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CEN T E R O N I N T E R N A T I O N A L C O O P E R A T I O N
Globalization and Scarcity
Multilateralism for a world with limits
Alex Evans
November 2010
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
CENTER ON INTERNATIONAL
COOPERATION
The world faces old and new security challenges that are more
complex than our multilateral and national institutions are
currently capable of managing. International cooperation is ever
more necessary in meeting these challenges. The NYU Center on
International Cooperation (CIC) works to enhance international
responses to conflict, insecurity, and scarcity through applied
research and direct engagement with multilateral institutions and
the wider policy community.
CIC’s programs and research activities span the spectrum of
conflict, insecurity, and scarcity issues. This allows us to see critical
inter-connections and highlight the coherence often necessary
for effective response. We have a particular concentration on the
UN and multilateral responses to conflict.
Table of Contents
Globalization and Scarcity |
Multilateralism for a world with limits
Acknowledgements 2
List of abbreviations
3
Executive Summary
5
Part 1: Into a World of Scarcity 10
Scarcity Issues: An Overview 10
Why See Scarcity Issues as a Set? 17
Part 2: Scarcity and Multilateralism 22
Development and Fragile States
22
Finance and Investment 28
International Trade
36
Strategic Resource Competition
41
Conclusion
47
Endnotes
48
Bibliography
52
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the generous financial assistance of the Government of Denmark, whose
support is gratefully acknowledged.
Alex would like to offer his sincere thanks to the Steering Group for the Center on International Cooperation’s program
on Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and Multilateralism: the governments of Brazil, Denmark, Mexico and Norway; and
William Antholis, David Bloom, Mathew J. Burrows, Helen Clark, Sarah Cliffe, Elizabeth Cousens, Meera de Mel, Geoff Dabelko,
David Nabarro, Robert Orr, Bryce Rudyk, Heather Simpson and Josette Sheeran.
Grateful thanks also go to Rahul Chandran, Jane Frewer, Richard Gowan, Andrew Hart, Michael Harvey, Bruce Jones, Matt
Kent, Georgios Kostakos, Florian Lux, Michael Mainelli, Nealin Parker, Janos Pasztor, Vera Quina, Elsina Wainwright and
Constance Wilhelm for their advice and assistance during this project; and especially to Emma Williams.
2
Special thanks are due to David Steven, with whom numerous of the ideas in this paper were developed. The paper draws
on a number of publications co-authored with David, including Hitting Reboot: Where next for climate change after
Copenhagen? (Brookings Institution, 2009), An Institutional Architecture for Climate Change (CIC, 2009), and The World
After Copenhagen: What can we learn from the geopolitical dynamics of climate negotiations? (CIC, 2010).The paper also
draws extensively on the analysis set out in Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization: Risk, Resilience and International
Order (Brookings Institution, 2010, co-authored with David and with Bruce Jones), and on papers commissioned by the
office of the UN Secretary-General and by the World Bank for the 2011 World Development Report.
About the author
Alex Evans directs CIC’s program on Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and Multilateralism. He also works on climate and
scarcity issues with organizations including the United Nations, World Bank and Oxfam, and co-edits GlobalDashboard.org,
the global risk and foreign policy blog, with David Steven.
From 2003 to 2006, Alex was Special Adviser to Hilary Benn MP, then UK Secretary of State for International Development,
where he worked across DFID’s policy agenda, focusing in particular on climate change, resource scarcity and multilateral
reform.
Alex’s previous publications can be downloaded from Global Dashboard.
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Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
List of abbreviations
BRIC
Brazil, Russia, India and China
CAP
EU Common Agricultural Policy
CDM
Clean Development Mechanism
CEO
Chief Executive Officer
CGIAR
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
CNOOC
China National Offshore Oil Corporation
CO
Carbon dioxide
CO2e
Carbon dioxide equivalent
CSD
UN Commission on Sustainable Development
DESA
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs
DFID
UK Department for International Development
DPA
UN Department of Political Affairs
DPI
UN Department of Public Information
DPKO
UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations
DRC
Democratic Republic of the Congo
EIA
US Energy Information Administration
EITI
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
EU
European Union
FAC
Food Aid Convention
FAO
Food and Agriculture Organization
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
GIEWS
FAO Global Information and Early Warning System
GPAFS
Global Partnership for Agriculture and Food Security
IEA
International Energy Agency
IEF
International Energy Forum
IEP
International Energy Program
IFAD
International Fund for Agricultural Development
IFPRI
International Food Policy Research Institute
IMF
International Monetary Fund
IPCC
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
mb/d
Million barrels of oil per day
MDG
Millennium Development Goal
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
mtoe
Million tonnes of oil equivalent
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NGO
Non-governmental organization
OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OCHA
UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance
ODA
Official Development Assistance
OPEC
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
2
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ppm
Parts per million (concentration level of CO2 or greenhouse gases)
R&D
Research and development
REDD
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
SADC
Southern African Development Community
SSM
Special Safeguard Mechanism
UNDP
UN Development Programme
UNEP
UN Environment Programme
UNFCCC
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
UNICEF
UN Children’s Fund
UNSG
UN Secretary-General
US
United States (of America)
WFP
World Food Programme
WMO
World Meteorological Organization
WTO
World Trade Organization
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Globalization has improved the living standards of
hundreds of millions of people – but growing resource
scarcity means it risks becoming a victim of its own
success. Left unaddressed, scarcity of food, energy,
water, land and other key ‘natural assets’ has the potential
to trigger intensifying zero sum competition between
states – in the process, increasing poverty, state fragility,
economic instability, inflation, and strategic resource
competition between major powers.
On food, projections suggest that production will need
to increase by 50% by 2030 (and 100% more by 2050), to
meet forecast demand. Yet there are already signs that the
productivity gains of the Green Revolution are running out
of steam, even as significant amounts of crops are being
diverted to biofuels. The 2008 food price spike provided
a taste of what may be to come, with the number of
undernourished people rising by over 150 million, unrest
in 61 countries and over 30 countries introducing export
bans or restrictions.
On land, competition between different land uses
is increasing fast – both globally (between land uses
including food, feed, fuel, forest conservation, carbon
sequestration and growing cities), and in hotspots
where land degradation, desertification, fast growing
populations and weak systems of land tenure create the
risk of political discord or violent conflict.
On water, demand will rise by around 25% by 2025, but
even existing consumption levels are already beyond
sustainable levels. Water scarcity will intensify over the
next decade as groundwater depletion continues in many
regions. Declining water availability is also projected to be
probably the most significant impact of climate change
over the next decade, with particular impacts on regions
dependent on glacial meltwater and trans-boundary
freshwater resources.
On energy, the International Energy Agency estimates
that investment of $26 trillion is needed between now
and 2030 to meet projected demand – a figure that rises
to $36.5 trillion once the need to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions is factored in too. However, current investment
totals are nowhere near this level, with investment in
energy having fallen particularly fast during the global
downturn – leading the IEA to warn of the risk of a renewed
oil supply crunch as the global economy recovers.
Climate change, finally, will intensify all of the above
challenges, reducing food and water availability, driving
massive shifts across energy and agricultural systems and
causing a range of other shocks and stresses. A particular
challenge facing policymakers is the fact that climate
change impacts are likely to be highly unpredictable, nonlinear, and hallmarked by sudden shifts as key thresholds
are passed.
These scarcity challenges need to be understood
as an integrated whole, not as separate issues. They
share common drivers, including both rising demand
– driven by a global population projected to reach an
estimated 9.2 billion by mid century, and the increasing
affluence of a growing ‘global middle class’ – and further
signs that the supply of key resources will struggle to
keep pace. All of them present the greatest risk to poor
people and countries, who have the least capacity to cope
with shocks or adapt to new realities. And all of them are
linked together by complex and often poorly understood
feedback loops, creating the risk of unexpected change,
unintended consequences from policy, and multiplier
effects that complicate attempts to manage risk.
5
Scarcity issues could emerge as an important catalyst
for collective international action to tackle global
challenges – in the process helping to ensure that a
globalization that is already efficient also becomes
more sustainable, equitable and resilient. Few observers
of the multilateral system would dispute that it is up to
the task of managing scarcity, configured as it is today.
But this paper argues that it is already possible to begin
assessing the key implications of scarcity issues for a range
of international agendas; to identify the specific cases in
which international collective action of reform of existing
multilateral institutions is needed; and to start mapping
out the key actions that need to be taken over the short,
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medium and longer term. In particular, the paper focuses
in on four key policy areas as follows:
Development and Fragile States
Climate change and resource scarcity will hit poor people
and countries hardest – not only for geographical reasons
(e.g. that climate impacts will impact disproportionately on
low latitudes), but also because of their high vulnerability.
Environmental shocks are often part of the reason people
become poor in the first place; poor people and countries
spend high proportions of their incomes on food and
fuel; the institutional and political weaknesses of fragile
states can make them more susceptible to conflict risks
arising from scarcity (although scarcity issues will usually
be threat multipliers, rather than stand-alone conflict risk
drivers).
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Multilateral actors are already massively involved in issues
of development, state fragility and conflict response,
and this – together with the fact that poor people and
countries are most vulnerable to scarcity – means that
the multilateral system will have no choice but to take
account of scarcity in its work in developing countries,
whether in humanitarian assistance, conflict mediation,
peacekeeping, long term development partnership or
support in international forums.
to provide ‘signals from the future’ that can improve longterm predictability for private sector investors; and third,
to protect poor people and poor countries from the effects
of scarcity by financing enhanced resilience.
International Trade
The food and fuel price spike demonstrated the risk of
acute trade shocks such as price spikes, and how these
can lead to knock-on social, economic and political
consequences. At the same time, such impacts risk leading
to countries losing confidence in open international trade
to ensure their security of supply on key commodities,
while in the climate context the potential for unilateral
use of ‘carbon tariffs’ risks leading to a slide towards titfor-tat protectionism. Over the longer term, increasing
energy scarcity or tight emissions controls could impede
international supply chains and reduce the overall volume
of international trade.
Effective multilateral cooperation can help to head off
these risks by creating trust between countries that they
can rely on the trade system to meet their needs – in
the process, easing security of supply concerns that risk
leading to self-fulfilling prophecies as countries act on
zero sum competition rather than cooperating to produce
open trade.
Finance and Investment
Strategic Resource Competition
The key areas in which investment is needed as a result
of climate change and resource scarcity are (a) energy
systems, where the policy challenge is to deliver both
energy security and climate stabilization at the lowest
possible cost; (b) agriculture, where there is a need
to finance increased crop production, again in a way
that addresses climate stabilization, and with far lower
input levels than today’s agriculture; and (c) the costs of
financing improved resilience (for example, through social
protection systems), especially in developing countries, in
particular in light of the need to adapt to climate change.
Three roles stand out for multilateralism. Collective
action is needed, first, to correct market failures, such as
environmental costs that are not reflected in prices; second,
Finally, increasing scarcity will create new strategic
resource competition between states – at worst, involving
the risk of inter-state conflict.158 of the world’s 263
international river basins lack any kind of cooperative
management framework, with projected glacial melting
an especially important risk driver in the future. Already,
both developed and emerging economies are engaged in
a scramble for energy resources in numerous regions, and
a similar dynamic may be emerging in the context of land
and food access deals. Climate impacts, especially rising
sea levels, will create new political disputes over newly
available resources and sea lanes, whilst challenging
existing legal infrastructure (for example, water sharing
agreements). Disputes between states over immigration
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
may become more common if climate change leads to an
increase in migration.
Multilateral cooperation is needed not only to contain
worst case scenarios, such as the risk of inter-state conflicts
over resources, but also the risk of a generalized shift away
from international cooperation, and towards zero sum
competition. Given the highly distributed nature of scarcity
issues, governments and international organizations will
also need to work collectively to build shared awareness
of scarcity issues among non-state actors, and shared
platforms that can help to construct political coalitions to
push for the international action needed.
The paper’s key recommendations in each of these areas
are summarized in the table below.
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS
Policy area
Implications of climate
change and scarcity
Why multilateralism is
needed
Key multilateral actions
Development and fragile
states
• Climate change and scarcity
combine with existing sources
of vulnerability to impact poor
people and countries hardest
• Risk of increased poverty, hunger;
economic impacts including
reduced growth, higher inflation,
worsening fiscal finances,
higher interest rates, currency
depreciation
• New winners and losers; wider
implications for political economy
of developing countries
• Risk of violent conflict (though
with scarcity usually as a threat
multiplier rather than a standalone cause)
• Multilateral institutions already
massively involved in issues of
development and state fragility
• Poor people and countries will be
disproportionately impacted by
climate change and scarcity
• Multilateral system will hence
increasingly have to take account
of scarcity issues across the board
in its work in poor countries
Short term
• Increase international
humanitarian assistance capacity
and funding
• Scale up social protection
systems, safety nets, etc.
• Build international donor capacity
for analysis of natural resource
governance, political economy
and conflict risk dimensions of
scarcity
• Scale up work on girls’ education,
access to reproductive health
services, women’s empowerment
and other sectors that can help
reduce unsustainable population
growth.
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Policy area
Implications of climate
change and scarcity
Why multilateralism is
needed
Development and fragile
states
Finance and investment
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Key multilateral actions
Medium term
• Work towards an integrated
approach to building resilience
as part of core development
strategies
• •Build scarcity issues into conflict
response strategies
Key questions and issues
• Need for more concrete examples
of low-carbon, climate-resilient
growth
• Need for integrated assessment
of finance for development needs
(see Finance and Investment
below)
• What happens if scarcity develops
to the point where social
protection systems are insufficient
for protecting poor people?
• Energy infrastructure investment
requirements of $36.5 trillion
between now and 2030
• Need for a 21st century ‘Green
Revolution’, especially in low
income countries with high
potential productivity gains –
potentially $420 billion between
now and 2030
• Mainstreaming of climate
adaptation through development
strategies – potentially around
$50-100 billion per year from
2015 onwards
• Role of collective action in
tackling market failures (e.g.
environmental costs that are
externalized from current price
signals)
• Governments need to provide
clear ‘signals from the future’ to
improve long-term predictability
for private sector investment
• Protecting poor people and
poor countries from the effects
of climate change and resource
scarcity
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
Short term
• Pursue key climate adaptation and
mitigation actions that can move
forward without a comprehensive
global deal
• Accelerate investment in a 21st
century ‘Green Revolution’
• Scale up R&D spending on both
energy and agriculture
Medium term
• Move to longer term commitment
periods and a more robust
compliance regime in global
climate policy
• Agree a global climate stabilization
target
• Equitable and binding targets for
developing countries within a
global emissions budget
Key questions and issues
• Need to reassess finance for
development requirements in light
of scarcity
Policy area
Implications of climate
change and scarcity
Why multilateralism is
needed
Key multilateral actions
International trade
• Risk of acute trade shocks in food
/ fuel contexts
• Risk of countries losing
confidence in open international
trade to ensure their security of
supply
• Potential unilateral use of carbon
tariffs, risking slide into tit-for-tat
protectionism
• Emission controls or oil scarcity
could drive reductions in
international trade volumes
• Role of international institutions
in creating enough trust to
support the global public good
of open trade (and avoiding tip
into zero sum competition and
protectionism)
• Current international institutions
poorly configured to cope with
scarcity trends (e.g. emerging
economies not full IEA members,
WTO lacks rules on export
restrictions)
• Protecting poor people and
poor countries from the effects
of climate change and resource
scarcity
Short term
• Bring emerging economies into
full IEA membership
• Scaling up food stocks (either
real or virtual, at multilateral or
regional level)
• Implement mechanisms to use
intergovernmental peer pressure
to reduce the risk of export bans or
restrictions
Medium term
• Move forward with liberalization of
developed country farm support
regimes
• Agree terms of use for carbon
tariffs to reduce the risk of ‘climate
protectionism’
Key questions and issues
• What will energy scarcity mean for
international trade?
• Will more countries come to
regard increased self-sufficiency
as more resilient than reliance on
open markets?
Strategic resource
competition
• Risk of increased competition
for trans-boundary fresh water
resources
• Risk of inter-state competition for
energy resources
• Risk of inter-state competition for
land, food, biofuels, etc.
• Impacts of climate change on
resource competition, especially
rising sea levels
• Potential disputes between
states over the fate of ‘climate
refugees’
• Risk of overall increase in zero
sum competition between states
in international relations
• Conflict risk arising from scarcity
directly relevant to UN Charter’s
primary objective of maintaining
international peace and security
• Intensifying zero sum
competition risks eroding
existing international
cooperation
• Governments and international
organizations need to work
collectively to build shared
awareness of scarcity issues
among non-state actors, and
shared platforms to build
coalitions for action
Short term
• Undertake stress testing of existing
multilateral architecture
• Build up foresight and surprise
anticipation capacities
• Invest in resilience, e.g. trade
measures as discussed earlier,
development policies
• Start developing options for
shared global operating systems to
manage scarcity
• Commission relevant international
agencies to produce a joint World
Resources Outlook
Medium term
• Start building up international
system bandwidth and interagency interoperability
• Develop political narratives
centered on ‘fair shares’, especially
on food, energy and climate
•Key questions and issues
• Will policymakers be ready to take
advantage of political windows of
opportunity for further-reaching
action as and when they open up?
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Part 1: Into a World of Scarcity
The world is entering an age of scarcity, with climate
change, food security, competition for land and water, and
energy security all moving steadily closer to the center of
the international agenda. As they do so, they are creating
new challenges and new concerns in foreign policy. As the
Financial Times’s Martin Wolf observed at the height of the
food price spike
“…the biggest point about debates on climate
change and energy supply is that they bring back
the question of limits. This is why climate change and
energy security are such geopolitically significant
issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may
also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits
to growth, the political underpinnings of our world
fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then
re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging –
within and among countries.” 1
10
This paper is about what scarcity issues mean for
international relations – and what they require in terms of
collective action and multilateral reform.
It begins by looking briefly at the key scarcity issues: food,
land, water, energy and climate change. Climate change
is regarded as a scarcity issue not only because it is the
key driver of change on the other three, but also because
‘airspace’ for human-caused greenhouse gas emissions
is itself an increasingly scarce resource – with just as
much potential to create zero sum disputes as any of the
others. (Other natural resource issues, such as forestry and
fisheries, are omitted from the paper’s analysis for reasons
of space – but many of the arguments made in this paper
would also apply to them.)
The paper then sets out why these scarcity trends need to
be regarded as an interconnected whole, noting that they
share both common drivers – a rising global population,
growing affluence, increasing limits to supply growth –
and a web of complex feedback loops of knock-on effects
from one scarcity issue to another.
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Finally, the paper looks at what these issues mean for
international relations more broadly, in particular the
areas of development and fragile states; international
trade; financing and investment; and inter-state strategic
resource competition.
Across all of these areas, the paper argues that effective
multilateral cooperation is essential – not only to build
resilience to the likely effects of scarcity, but also to coordinate the collective action needed to stabilize the root
causes of resource scarcity and shift the world to a more
sustainable trajectory.
Scarcity Issues: An Overview
Food
The food price spike that peaked in 2008 pushed the global
total of undernourished people over a billion for the first
time, from a total of 854 million before the spike.2 With oil
prices spiking at the same time, 61 countries experienced
political unrest, in many cases violent; more than thirty
imposed food export bans or restrictions.3
More recently, the summer of 2010 saw unpleasant
reminders of the events of two years earlier. Wheat prices
saw their biggest one month jump in over three decades
following a severe drought in Russia, and rose still further
following Russia’s decision to ban exports of the crop; in
Mozambique, a 30% rise in bread prices triggered riots
that left seven dead and 288 wounded.4
Concerns about a repeat of 2008 appear overdone – the
International Grains Council points out that the world
is in fact on course for the third highest wheat crop on
record in 2010 – but the volatile summer had the effect
of refocusing political and media attention on the issue of
food prices, and on the long term challenge of feeding a
world of nine billion.5 So what drove the food price spike –
and should policymakers expect a repeat?
As many commentators and analysts have observed since
the food price spike, the period of 2006 to 2008 was in
many ways a ‘perfect storm’.6
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
As Figure 1 below shows, the Food and Agriculture
Organization’s benchmark Food Price Index rose by 9%
during 2006, by 24% during 2007 and by 51% during the
twelve months to July 2008.7
Among the key drivers of the food price spike were
historically low stock levels(food reserves declined from
over 110 days’ worth just before 2000, to just over 60
days’ worth by 2004); poor weather in important producer
countries; and high oil prices (which pushed up costs for
transportation and for inputs like fertilizer).8
As prices approached their peak, a range of positive
feedback loops driven by the perceptions of consumers,
investors and governments had the effect of amplifying
the crisis. As already noted, over 30 governments
implemented food export bans or restrictions in attempts
to calm domestic political pressures over food prices –
pushing food prices higher at the same time as reducing
incentives for producers to increase output. At the same
time, many import dependent countries tried to rebuild
their stock levels, pushing prices higher still. 9
Figure 1: FAO Food Price Index, 1990-2010 (source:
Food and Agriculture Organization)10
changing diet patterns of a growing middle class and a
large increase in biofuels production in the US and the EU,
driven by government subsidies and regulatory mandates.
Looking to the future, the World Bank suggests that
demand for food could grow by 50% by 2030, even before
biofuels are taken into account.11
Yet the yield increases driven by the 20th century Green
Revolution appear to be running out of steam, with average
productivity growth rates falling from 2.0% between 1970
and 1990 to 1.1% between 1990 and 2007, and further
falls projected in the future.12 The US Department of
Agriculture’s Economic Research Service observed in 2008
global demand for grain outstripped supply for seven of the
eight years between 2000 and 2008.13 In future, the supply
side also appears likely to be increasingly constrained by
the other scarcity issues discussed in this section, namely:
•
Lower water availability–likely to be the most
important scarcity issue affecting food production in the
short term;
11
•
Competition for land–given that the amount of arable
land available globally has fallen from 0.39 hectares per
capita in 1960 to 0.21 hectares in 2007; 14
•
Rising oil prices–which will make inputs and
transportation more expensive while increasing the
attractiveness of biofuels; and
•
Climate change–which is projected to have a negative impact on crop yields in most developing countries
more or less immediately (and in all countries over the
longer term), will expose tens of millions more people to
the risk of hunger, and which will greatly complicate the
challenge on each of the three scarcity issues previously
mentioned.15
Land
But a range of underlying structural drivers was also
involved, and it is here that the reasons for fears about
longer term global food security become apparent.
Demand for crops is rising sharply, not only because of an
expanding global population, but also as a result of the
Before the 20th century, additional demand for food was
met almost entirely through increasing acreage – the
amount of land under cultivation – rather than through
enhancing the crop yield from each hectare in production.
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During the 20th century, this dynamic reversed, with
increasing crop yields the key driver that allowed food
production to keep pace with a rising global population.
In the 21st century, however, many analysts suggest that
meeting food needs will once more require more land to
be brought into food production.16
The problem, however, is that growing global demand for
food is by no means the only source of increasing demand
for land. Land is also needed for:
•
feed for the world’s livestock industry, which is
converted into meat (demand for which is projected to
grow by 85% by 2030, according to the World Bank) and
dairy products, both of which are proportionally much
more resource-intensive than direct consumption of
crops;17
12
•
crops to use as biofuels, which accounted for almost
half the increase in the consumption of major food crops
in 2006-07, according to the International Monetary Fund
(primarily as a result of corn-based ethanol production in
the United States);18
•
forestry to produce fiber, such as paper (demand
for which is projected to grow by 2.1% a year to 2020)
and timber (demand for which is projected to rise by 1%
a year); 19
•
cities (FAO has estimated the global urban expansion
rate to be 20,000km2 per year, with 80% of this taking place
on agricultural land (cities account for a small proportion
of total global land use, but tend to grow on some of the
best agricultural land); 20
At the same time, the amount of arable land available per
person has fallen steadily over recent decades, even taking
into account the amount of land converted from forest
cover. As noted above, the amount of arable land available
globally fell from 0.39 hectares per person in 1960 to 0.21
hectares per capita in 2007 – despite the extent to which
large-scale deforestation had brought more cropland into
production over the same period. 23
In addition to competition for land between sectors at
the global level, there is also the possibility of intensifying
‘land scarcity’ in particular regional hotspots where rapidly
growing population levels combine with land degradation
and weak land tenure regimes to create resource stress
and potentially the risk of violent conflict. These risks are
discussed further in the next chapter of the paper, as are
growing concerns about the impact of international deals
for leasing arable land.
Admittedly, reductions in the amount of land available for
arable crops can be offset by improved yields on the land
that is available – which is what has happened over the
last fifty years. Even as arable land per capita almost halved
from 1960 to 2007, global food production was able to
keep pace with the world’s growing population, thanks to
the ‘Green Revolution’ of new seed varieties, increased use
of fertilizer, and expanded irrigation. 24
As already noted, however, the productivity growth driven
by these techniques has fallen significantly since 1970,
and scarcity trends (particularly of water, discussed below)
will necessitate a far more resource-efficient approach in
future.
Water
•
afforestation projects used to sequester CO2 from
the atmosphere;21 and finally
•
protection of existing forests, either for biodiversity
objectives or to avoid greenhouse gas emissions
(potentially a particularly important source of demand
for land, given that overall expansions in grassland,
agricultural crops and urban areas have come at the
expense of equivalent overall reductions in forest area). 22
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In water, too, the long term outlook is one of rapidly
increasing demand coupled with hard questions about
whether supply will be able to keep pace. As population
and average per capita water use have grown, so the
amount of fresh water withdrawn globally each year has
grown too – from 579 cubic kilometers in 1900 to 3,973
km3 in 2000. Demand is projected to rise further to 5,235
km3 in 2025.25
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
Much of the increase in demand over this period came
from agriculture, which today accounts for 70% of human
water use, with the majority used by irrigation – one of the
central planks of the success of the 20th century Green
Revolution in raising crop yields.26 From 1961 to 1999,
the amount of land under irrigation worldwide grew at
an astonishing rate, most of all in West Asia (where the
increase was 256%); at present, 40% of the world’s food
supply comes from land that is irrigated.
However, most irrigation is highly inefficient. While
surface water irrigation efficiency is between 50-60% in
Israel, Japan and Taiwan, for example, it is only 25-40%
in India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand.
Technologies exist that could dramatically improve
efficiency levels, but uptake levels remain low, often due
to a lack of water pricing: less than 1% of the irrigated area
in both China and India uses drip irrigation, for example
(compared to 90% in Cyprus).28 Subsidized electricity
compounds the problem, encouraging profligate
pumping of groundwater.29 Meanwhile, demand is
growing rapidly from sources other than agriculture,
above all industrialization and the world’s growing cities.
Consequently, unsustainable rates of water extraction
from both rivers and groundwater are already a major
problem all over the world. 1.2 billion people live in
basins where human use has exceeded sustainable limits;
by 2025, this figure will rise to 1.8 billion, with up to two
thirds of the world’s population living in water-stressed
conditions, mostly in non-OECD countries.30 Others will
suffer from the problem of too much water rather than
too little, often because of poor drainage or flooding, with
the result that land becomes waterlogged, salts build up
in the soil, and fertility decreases – a problem that affects
10-15% of irrigated land.31
Climate change will make matters worse.32 A range of
areas are likely to see significantly reduced overall water
runoff over the 21st century, including particularly the
Mediterranean, Middle East, Southern Africa and the
western USA / northern Mexico.33 Many more areas will
experience large seasonal changes, particularly in regions
where summer river flows depend on snowmelt and
/ or glacial melting.34 More than a sixth of the world’s
population lives in river basins fed by glaciers or snowmelt
– including the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze and
Yellow, all of which rely on the Himalayas.35
Climate change will also affect water security through
rising sea levels – which will reduce freshwater availability
in coastal regions as estuaries and groundwater become
salinized – and through changes in the variability and
intensity of precipitation, which will increase the risk of
both droughts and floods. 36
While water scarcity issues are often local rather than
international, two important exceptions exist. One is the
case of trans-boundary watercourses. At present, 263 rivers
either cross or delineate national borders (the number
changes when, for example, new states are created). As the
next chapter discusses, however, 158 of these lack any kind
of cooperative management framework, and even where
such frameworks do exist, they are increasingly coming
under stress (as for example in the cases of the Nile and
Indus).
13
The second, less obvious way in which water security
becomes an international issue is through ‘virtual’ or
‘embedded’ water – the water used to grow a crop that is
then exported, thus in effect exporting the water too. One
kilogram of wheat effectively contains 1,300 liters of virtual
water, for example, while 15,500 liters of water are needed
to product 1kg of beef, and the 500g of cotton needed
to produce a medium size T-shirt requires 4,100 liters of
water. As water resources become more scarce, it has
been suggested that governments seeking land purchases
in third countries (discussed later) are actually primarily
interested in the water resources that come with that land.
The CEO of the food company Nestle, for example, has
argued that:
“… with the land comes the right to withdraw the
water linked to it, in most countries essentially a
freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable
part of the deal. Estimated on the basis of one crop
per year, land purchased represents 55 to 65 cubic
kilometers of embedded freshwater, an amount
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equal to roughly 1½ times the water held by the
Hoover Dam. And, because this water has no price,
the investors can take it over virtually free.”40
As with food, however, oil faces hard questions about
whether supply growth will be able to keep pace with
increasing demand. Throughout the last decade, as
demand for oil was exploding, supply was struggling to
Figure 2: Water Poverty Index, 2005 (source: Oxford Centre for Water Research)
14
No Data
Severe (WPI 35-47.9)
High (WPI 48-55.9)
Energy security
Energy is another area in which demand is increasing
rapidly. The International Energy Agency forecasts that
world primary energy demand will increase by 1.5% a year
between 2007 and 2030, an overall increase of 40%.41 The
IEA identifies developing Asian economies as the main
drivers of this demand growth, with by far the biggest
increase in demand accounted for by coal, followed by
natural gas. 42
However, with coal projected to remain readily available
for years to come and natural gas markets experiencing
a supply glut due to booming production in North
America as a result of new drilling techniques, it is oil that
is the main focus of energy security concerns. By 2030,
oil remains the single largest fuel in the primary energy
mix on IEA projections; demand for oil rises by 1% a year
over this period, from 85 million barrels a day in 2007 to
105 mb/d with 97% of the increase accounted for by the
transport sector.43
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Medium (WPI 56-61.9)
Medium Low (WPI 62-67.9)
Low (WPI 68-78)
keep pace, remaining stubbornly at around 85 million
barrels a day.44 As a result, oil prices followed a similar
trajectory to food over the decade just ended, rising
from around $20 per barrel in 1990 to $147 per barrel in
July 2008, before falling sharply as the global economy
slowed.45
One reason why oil prices rose so much during this
period was the long time-lag involved in developing new
supplies; another was low stock levels before the price
spike.46 From 2007, price volatility was further increased
by the weakening of the US dollar, which set off a ‘flight to
commodities’ as investors turned to oil and other resources
as a store of value.47 Supply side tightness also made the
oil market especially vulnerable to local shocks, such as
supply disruptions in Nigeria and Venezuela.48
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
Figure 3: World spot prices for oil, 1989-2010
(source: US Energy Information Administration)49
In the background, however, was the story of the decline
of ‘easy oil’ – a trend which is likely to prove ever more
significant in years to come. As Michael Klare has written,
“each new barrel added to global reserves … will prove
harder and more costly to extract than the one before; it
will be buried deeper underground, farther offshore, in
more hazardous environments, or in more conflict-prone,
hostile regions of the planet.” 50
While crude oil prices collapsed from July 2008 onwards,
reaching a low of around $35 in January 2009, they had
by June 2009 already rallied to around $70 per barrel as
tentative signs of economic recovery started to appear in
some parts of the world – leading some analysts to wonder
“why oil prices aren’t $20 per barrel, as they were only
eight years ago, during the last recession.”51 At the time of
writing, in fall 2010, oil prices stand at just over $80.52
The second security of supply concern on oil centers on
whether the world is approaching the ‘peak’ of global
oil production – when the rate of world oil production
reaches its highest level, and starts to decline.54 While
such arguments were, until recently, viewed as somewhat
fringe by mainstream energy analysts, they have become
significantly more mainstream over the last two years.
The chief executive of Total, Europe’s third largest energy
group, has argued that the world will never be able to
produce more than 89 million barrels of oil per day, for
example.
While arguments about how much oil remains in the
ground continue to be divisive and contested, there is
broader agreement that the supply side for oil looks set to
become tighter in future. In reality, the peak of global oil
production could result not because of geological factors,
but rather because of ‘above ground’ factors, such as a
marked deterioration in regional security in the Middle
East or an OECD ban on deepwater drilling. As the UK
government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir
David King, has argued:
15
“While there is certainly vast amounts of fossil fuel
resources left in the ground, the volume of oil that
can be commercially exploited at prices the global
economy has become accustomed to is limited and
will soon decline. The result is that oil may soon shift
from a demand-led market to a supply constrained
market.” 55
Climate change
Looking to the future, concerns for security of oil supplies
center on two key issues. The first is the risk that the
crash in oil prices in the second half of 2008, coupled
with ongoing tight financial sector lending, has led to
an ongoing shortfall in investment in oil exploration and
production. The International Energy Agency has warned
on several occasions during the global downturn that
these shortfalls risk setting the stage for a new oil supply
crunch as soon as the global economy recovers, and noted
in the 2009 World Energy Outlook that global upstream oil
and gas investment budgets had been cut by 19% from
2008 to 2009. 53
This leads, finally, into the broader challenges posed by
climate change.
Since pre-industrial times, global average temperatures
have increased by 0.7º Celsius. Emissions already in the
atmosphere mean that the world is committed to a further
increase of 0.6º Celsius.56 Even if the 2009 Copenhagen
climate summit had agreed stringent action, this might
have proved insufficient to avoid global average warming
of 2º Celsius or more; as it is, the summit’s weak outcome
leaves the world on track for average warming of around
3º degrees. 57
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Climate change will have far-reaching implications and
knock-on effects for all of the scarcity issues already
discussed in this chapter.
While today’s energy systems are driving climate
change, the need to tackle climate change must drive
tomorrow’s energy systems. The scale of change required
is breathtaking. As noted above, global emissions cuts of
50-85% are needed by 2050.58 The IEA is unable to model
a scenario in which such demanding cuts are achieved
without replacement of existing capital stock before the
end of its usual lifetime. In the energy context, ‘adaptation’
to climate change will be as much about adapting to the
solutions that are needed as adapting to direct climate
impacts.59
Table 1: Climate change policy – requirements
versus current situation
16
Where we need to be
Where we are
According to the
Intergovernmental Panel on
•Current atmospheric levels of
CO2 already just over 389ppm,
and rising by around 2ppm per
Climate Change (IPCC)60 , limiting
average temperature increase to
2º Celsius would involve:
year.61
•
•
Stabilizing greenhouse gas
levels in the air at between
350 and 400 parts per
million of carbon dioxide
(or 445-490 ppm of carbon
dioxide equivalent, with
other greenhouse gases
included).
•
Global emissions peaking
by 2015 at the latest.
•
Global emissions then
declining by 50-85% below
2000 levels by 2050.
Weak outcome at
Copenhagen appears
to leave global average
warming on track for 3°
Celsius.62
•
2009 WEO Reference
Scenario projects
continuing growth in
emissions – from 28.8
Gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 a
year in 2007 to 40.2 Gt of
CO2 by 2030, an increase of
40%.63
•
A recent MIT study gave
a median projection
of atmospheric CO2
concentrations reaching
866ppm by 2095 on the
basis of current emissions,
with median surface
warming of 5.1º Celsius.64
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On food, while the 2007 IPCC Assessment Report projected
that “on the whole” global food production would increase
with warming between 1-3º Celsius, it also argued that it
would decrease beyond this. In low and tropical latitudes –
where most developing countries are – it found that “even
moderate temperature increases (1-2º Celsius) are likely to
have negative yield impacts for major cereals”.65
These estimates also took no account of the effect on food
production of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes
and floods. The 2010 floods in Pakistan and drought in
Russia (each of which was attributed by the government
to climate change) provided two vivid examples of the
effects that such events can have on agriculture. Overall,
the IPCC estimates that climate change will expose tens to
hundreds of millions more people to the risk of hunger.66
At the same time, agriculture’s own contribution to
climate change will need to be reduced drastically.
Agriculture accounts for up to 32% of global greenhouse
gas emissions, if deforestation is included.67 Over time, it
will have to become a net sink for emissions rather than
a net source of them – a shift that agriculture has barely
begun to anticipate, but which will massively intensify the
challenge faced by farmers as they attempt to meet rising
demand.
On water, as just noted, climate change will cause major
problems through changes in precipitation, glacial
melting, droughts and other shifts.
Finally, climate change will introduce a range of other
risks in addition outside of those in the water, food and
energy sectors. Among the most important will be the
danger faced by densely populated coastal ‘megadeltas’
in Asia and Africa, such as the Nile, Ganges–Brahmaputra
and Mekong, where tens of millions of people will be at
increased risk of acute flood and storm damage, chronic
coastal flooding and loss of coastal wetlands.68 Other
impacts will include extensive implications for health and
infectious disease.
For policymakers, it can be hard to make sense of what
is happening. New science findings continue to emerge
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
rapidly. The IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report is
already out of date in some key respects.69 While climate
models are improving all the time, their findings remain
subject to considerable uncertainty, especially at more
specific levels of geographical focus. And while estimates
of future climate impacts may seem to imply steady,
gradual changes that can be adapted to over time, past
changes in the earth’s climate have been the opposite:
unpredictable, highly non-linear, and hallmarked by
sudden shifts as thresholds are passed. Policymakers must
hence also consider the risk of abrupt climate change
resulting from positive feedback effects, such as:
•
rapid die-back of tropical forests or melting of Arctic
tundra (both of which would release large amounts of
methane into the atmosphere); 70
•
rapid melting of polar ice sheets or glaciers (which
would result in higher sea levels);71 or
•
reduction in the capacity of atmospheric sinks such as
the world’s oceans to absorb carbon dioxide (which
would magnify the impact of current emissions).72
While these kinds of risk are largely omitted from IPCC
assessments because of the high degree of uncertainty
associated with them, they remain a real consideration
for policymakers wanting to take a risk management
approach based on feasible worst case scenarios.73
Current best-guess estimates suggest that global average
warming of around 2° Celsius may be a key threshold for
some of these effects – but such assessments are tentative
guesses at best, and may prove to be over-optimistic.74 In
effect, then, policymakers responding to scarcity issues
must make a bet on the basis of incomplete information
and their own attitudes to risk.
Why See Scarcity Issues as a Set?
So why think of energy, food and water security as an
integrated whole under the collective ‘scarcity’ heading –
rather than regarding them simply as separate issues?
Common drivers
First and most obviously, because of the extent to which
scarcity issues all share common drivers. On one side of
the equation, demand for food, land, water, energy and
‘atmospheric space’ for anthropogenic emissions is rising –
for two reasons. First, the ‘global middle class’ is growing in
size and affluence. Especially important for scarcity issues
are
•
energy use (larger homes, increased mobility, energy
used to manufacture and move consumer goods – and
hence greater demand for both oil and, increasingly,
biofuels); and
•
diet (higher consumption of meat, dairy products and
processed food than the global average, which are in
turn far more resource intensive in terms of energy,
grain, water use and greenhouse gas emissions).
People in developed countries have consumed a
disproportionate share of these resources for decades. But
what has changed in the last 10 years is the sheer pace
of growth in China and other emerging economies. By
mid-2007, the four ‘BRIC’ economies – Brazil, Russia, India
and China – together accounted for 15% of the world
economy.75 This trend is set to accelerate: even before
the global downturn, in which emerging economies
have often fared better than OECD economies, Goldman
Sachs suggested that the four BRICs could outweigh the
combined GDP of the G7 economies by 2035.76
17
This dizzying growth has, in turn, brought the issue of
global resource consumption to a head. Perhaps the most
vivid illustration of the implications of current growth rates
for natural resources is seen by simply following the logic
of exponential growth rates to its logical conclusion. With
annual GDP growth of 9%, China’s economy doubles in
size roughly every 7-8 years – with all of the resource use
implications that this entails.
The second reason for rising global demand is a growing
world population. Contrary to many popular perceptions,
the rate of global population growth has actually slowed
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substantially in recent decades, having peaked in
1963.77 While many discussions of resource scarcity still
focus anxiously on the idea of a Malthusian ‘population
explosion’, in fact global population levels are on course
to stabilize, at around 10 billion people.78 With strong
commitment to the policies such as girls’ education,
women’s empowerment and access to reproductive
health services, stabilization could happen much sooner,
and at much lower levels.79
Table 2: World’s 20 Most Populous Countries,
2007 and 2050 (source: UN DESA)81
2007
18
2050
Country
Population
(m)
Country
Population
(m)
China
1,329
India
1,658
India
1,169
China
1,409
USA
306
USA
402
Indonesia
232
Indonesia
297
Brazil
192
Pakistan
292
Pakistan
164
Nigeria
289
Bangladesh
159
Bangladesh
254
Nigeria
148
Brazil
254
Russia
142
DRC
187
Japan
128
Ethiopia
183
Mexico
107
Philippines
140
Philippines
88
Mexico
132
Vietnam
87
Egypt
121
Ethiopia
83
Venezuela
120
Germany
83
Russia
108
Egypt
75
Japan
103
Turkey
75
Iran
100
Iran
71
Turkey
99
Thailand
64
Uganda
92
DRC
63
Kenya
85
However, most future population growth will be heavily
concentrated in the world’s lowest income regions, where
population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion now to
7.9 billion in 2050 under the UN’s median scenario, and
especially in cities.80
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As the table above illustrates, the list of countries in which
population growth is likely to be fastest includes numerous
states that are as fragile as they are regionally significant –
including Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Iran and Kenya.
On the other hand, there is the challenge of limitations to
supply growth of energy, food and water, as discussed in
the last section. Admittedly, innovation and technology
can make a huge contribution towards both increasing
supply and reducing demand. But important obstacles
stand in the way. One is the extent to which public R&D
budgets have declined in recent decades: the budget
for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR) has fallen by 50% over the last 15 years,
for instance, while the IEA estimates that public R&D on
energy is half its level of 25 years ago.82
Many other technologies face barriers in attaining
commercial roll-out, for example because of the often
long timescales on which capital investment costs are
recouped. Another key barrier to the uptake of clean or
high-efficiency technologies is that environmental costs
are frequently ‘externalized’, i.e. not properly reflected
through price mechanisms. This is particularly true of
water, which is often not priced at all, but it also applies to
energy prices (which tend not to reflect the environmental
costs of fossil fuel combustion), food production (where
food prices rarely include costs that are borne elsewhere,
such as pollution from fertilizer use) and ‘environmental
services’ (such as the vital role played by the world’s forests
in regulating the climate – for which the owners of forest
land rarely receive recompense).
Common linkages
The second reason for seeing energy, food and water
scarcity as a single set of issues is the dense, and
increasingly complex, mesh of feedback loops between
them.
These feedback loops are often most apparent at country
level. In Haiti, for example, complex feedback loops of
cause and effect link deforestation, soil loss and erosion,
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
degradation of agricultural land, changed precipitation
patterns and increased risk of flooding with human
variables such as increased hunger and food insecurity,
the risk of instability and violent conflict, and state fragility
(see Figure 4 below).
Figure 4: Satellite image of border of Haiti and
Dominican Republic, showing deforestation
(2002)
At regional and global level, the complexity of these
linkages and feedback loops increases still further, thus
raising the risk of unexpected outcomes, disruptive
change and unintended consequences.
The linkage between energy and food provides a
particularly good example of why such feedback loops
matter for policy. Over the last century (and particularly
over the last decade), energy and food, have in effect been
converging into a single food-energy economy. Today,
energy can be converted into food, food into energy, and
prices for both are becoming linked in a process termed by
Goldman Sachs as “bushel-to-barrel convergence.”83
While modern agriculture has achieved massive increases
in crop yields, it has done so partly by becoming more
energy intensive. Mechanization began to replace human
labor in agriculture early in the 20th century. Since then,
dependence on fossil fuels has further increased, whether
in nitrogenous fertilizers (made in energy-intensive
processes in which fossil fuels are also the raw material),
on-farm energy use (including heating livestock sheds and
greenhouses, as well as tractors and combine harvesters),
and the energy used to pump groundwater for irrigation.
Today’s longer supply chains are also energy-intensive in
their dependence on fossil fuels and refrigeration systems.
Agriculture’s energy dependence is hence one of the
major reasons why higher oil prices tend to mean higher
food prices.84
The other half of the food-energy link has to do with
the growing importance of biofuels in the international
energy economy. Although less than 2% of global demand
for liquid fuels is met by biofuels, they accounted for 75%
of the increase in non-OPEC oil supplies in 2008.85 And
while biofuels’ contribution to total liquid fuel needs may
be small, they have nonetheless caused major ripples in
the food context. As the IMF noted in its World Economic
Outlook 2008
“Although biofuels still account for 1.5% of the global
liquid fuels supply, they accounted for almost half
the increase in the consumption of major food crops
in 2006-07, mostly because of corn-based ethanol
produced in the United States.”86
19
As biofuels show, the linkages between different scarcity
issues introduces the risk of unintended consequences
from policy measures taken to tackle one scarcity issue,
without taking other dimensions of scarcity into account. A
measure taken to improve US energy security can have the
side-effect of creating substantial food security problems
in multiple other locations around the world.
The convergence of the world’s energy and food
economies provides just one example of how scarcity
issues are increasingly overlapping with one another. There
are many others. Water security is often energy-intensive,
for example, whether in the energy used to power
groundwater pumps or in the high energy use rates often
associated with desalination technologies; equally, many
countries rely on water to produce electricity, through
hydroelectric power generation. Water and food are
connected through the fact that agriculture accounts for
70% of human water use; land is connected to water since
land rights usually come with rights to extract the water
continued on page 21
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Table 3: Selected linkages between scarcity issues
Cause...effect
Energy
Food / land use
Water
Climate change
Agriculture is a major
consumer of energy,
both directly (cultivation,
harvest, processing,
refrigeration, distribution)
and indirectly (fertilizer,
pesticides, other inputs)
Water is a highly energy
intensive industry (energy
= 40% of cost of water in
developing countries)
Climate change demands
retreat from fossil fuels,
investment in new energy
systems
Groundwater depletion
leads to higher energy use
for extracting / desalinizing
water
Extreme weather can
severely impact oil
production (e.g. hurricanes
in Gulf of Mexico)
Higher energy prices lead
to higher food prices as
input and transport costs
increase
Lower water availability
has negative effect on crop
yields, can make some
crops unsuitable for areas
Short term yield variance
due to rising temperatures
Biofuels create arbitrage
relationship between food
and fuel, pulling food costs
upwards in line with energy
Changes in water
management (dams,
irrigation, etc.) can affect
viability and productivity of
land downstream
Energy
Food / land use
Biofuel cultivation leads
to increase in demand for
cultivable land
20
Reduced yields through
extreme weather events
Reduced yields through
changes in precipitation
and water availability
Desertification, land and
soil degradation will
increase with climate
change
Deforestation for firewood
Water
Higher energy costs lead
to higher water costs
because of energy used
in extracting / pumping /
processing it
Water essential for
hydroelectric power
generation (c. 16%
of global total power
generation)
Climate change
Emissions drive climate
change
Some air pollution
dampens climate change
by reducing radiative
forcing
Energy security concerns
may lead to more coal use
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Increased water use for
irrigation can affect water
resources (e.g. shrinking of
Aral Sea)
Climate-driven changes
in precipitation; increased
droughts
Changes in water
availability e.g. through
glacial melting
Land use change affects
water management (e.g.
wetland drainage reduces
flood resilience)
CO2 emissions from
agriculture energy use
(cultivation, processing,
refrigeration, distribution)
See energy intensity points
above
Methane emissions from
livestock, rice cultivation;
deforestation leads to
methane emissions as trees
decompose
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
continued from page 19
beneath it; and so on. (Table 3 provides a fuller overview
of some of the most important linkages between different
aspects of scarcity.)
Nor are the direct feedback loops between scarcity issues
the only ways in which they are linked. As the section on
development and fragile states discusses, all aspects of
scarcity have in common the extent to which poor people
and fragile or low income states are especially vulnerable
to them. All have the potential to drive increased violent
conflict, albeit almost always as threat multipliers rather
than as stand-alone causes. And because of the numerous
international dimensions of scarcity issues, together with
the resource dependence of the global economy, all pose
profound questions for globalization itself.
21
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Part 2: Scarcity and Multilateralism
Development and Fragile States
What do climate change and scarcity mean for
development and fragile states?
In the real world, the impacts of resource scarcity or climate
change will almost always blur with those of other risk
drivers – which makes it hard to attribute any particular
shock, stress or other impact solely to climate change or
resource scarcity.
22
Take for example recent figures on the global total of
undernourished people. In 2007, according to the UN
High-level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis, 854
million people were undernourished.87 By late 2009, the
Food and Agriculture Organization put the figure at 1.05
billion.88 While one part of the reason for the rise was the
final year of the food and fuel price spike, another part was
due to the subsequent effects of the global downturn,
which further eroded the purchasing power of many
poor people.89 (The figure has subsequently fallen to an
estimated 925 million undernourished people.)90 Likewise,
the peacebuilding agency International Alert stresses that
the most significant impacts of climate change may be
“consequences of consequences” – indirect effects felt in
the broader social, political or economic arena.90
The problem of attribution of effects to scarcity is
compounded by the fact that vulnerability – whether
of individuals, communities, ecosystems, states, or
economies – is as important a hazard in determining the
impact that shocks and stresses driven by scarcity have on
the ground.
Poor people are especially vulnerable to scarcity, as to
other risks, in particular when these risks are experienced
as sudden-onset events that can lead to poverty traps.
Droughts, for instance, often force poor families to sell
livestock or other assets. Other kinds of shock can force
families to take children out of school. When such shocks
come in cycles, they are often what cause people to
become poor or stay poor. Environmental risks are an
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especially common cause of such shocks; climate change
will worsen the problem.92 Poor people are also most at
risk from food or fuel price spikes because they spend a
high proportion of income on these commodities: in the
case of food, often between 50-80%.
The same applies at the country level for importdependent low income countries. An International Energy
Agency study published in late 2007 found that in 13 nonoil producing African countries – including South Africa,
Ghana, Ethiopia and Senegal – increases in the cost of oil
over the previous three years came to more than the sum
of aid and debt relief they received over the same period.93
The food spike affected poor countries hardest too: during
2008, low-income food-deficit countries saw their import
bills rise by as much as 40%.94
State fragility is another source of vulnerability for many
countries. A 2007 report from International Alert found
that 46 countries would experience a “high risk of violent
conflict” as climate change interacted with economic,
social and political problems, while in a further 56
countries “the institutions of government will have great
difficulty taking the strain of climate change on top of all
their other current challenges.”95
So climate change and resource scarcity are better
understood as ‘threat multipliers’ than as stand-alone
sources of risk to poor people and fragile states.96 With
this caveat stated, however, a range of potential impacts
can be identified.
First, climate change and scarcity risk leading to a rise
in poverty. As noted, the number of undernourished
people rose sharply during the food and fuel price spike.
In rural areas, where three quarters of poor people live,
rising energy costs also saw small farmers hit by steep
increases in costs for fertilizer and pumping water.97 In the
future, the number of people at risk of hunger because of
climate change is expected to increase by 10-20% more
than would be expected without climate change, with
the number of malnourished children rising 21% over the
same period.98
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
Second, scarcity issues will have far-reaching implications
for the political economy of developing nations. As a
recent World Bank study observed, “renewable natural
resources define systems of power and access” in a range
of ways, including ownership, consumption, distribution
and governance.99 In countries with patronage-based
political systems, the effect of such resources becoming
scarcer may change the political economy balance by
reducing the size of the patronage ‘cake’, or creating new
winners and losers – potentially contributing to unrest
or violent conflict in the process (see below). Land and
water governance regimes are especially important in this
context.
Conversely, growing resource scarcity may also create new
forms of the ‘resource curse’ – the problem in which pointsourced commodities such oil, diamonds, precious metals,
minerals and certain plantation crops such as coffee and
cocoa have the effect of “warping the political economy
of a country” by encouraging rent-seeking competition,
facilitating corruption and catalyzing conflict over control
of revenues.100 In the Niger Delta, for example, perceived
inequalities in benefit-sharing from oil production have
contributed to an insurgency that has, at times, shut
down one fifth of the country’s oil production.101 If oil
prices are set for long-term inflation, then the risk of such
insurgencies – and their capacity to leverage impact – may
increase.
It is also possible that new kinds of commodity may
become subject to the resource curse in future as a result
of resource scarcity – for example as a result of unequally
shared benefits from third country land or food access
deals (so-called ‘land grabs’ – which as noted earlier, can
also be water grabs).
One potential indicator of this risk was the 2009 controversy
in Madagascar over a deal which saw the South Korean
company Daewoo lease one half of the country’s arable
land for 100 years – for which the government would
receive no payment.102 When news of the deal broke in
the Financial Times, discontent simmered over, and was
widely perceived to have contributed to the coup d’état
that took place in March 2009. The new President’s first
act was to cancel the deal.103 More recently, a major World
Bank report on such deals argued that a priority was for
governments to “improve land governance to ensure
that the pressures from higher land values do not lead to
dispossession of existing rights.” 104
Another risk is that scarcity shocks can lead to violent
unrest. During the food and fuel price spike that peaked
in 2008, for example, 61 countries experienced unrest as
a result of price inflation. In 38 countries, these protests
turned violent, with fragile states proving particularly
susceptible to this problem.105 More recently, as noted
earlier in the paper, Mozambique experienced serious
unrest in summer 2010 when it tried to reduce subsidies on
bread, leaving seven people dead and over 200 injured.106
At worst, scarcity may contribute to the outbreak or
sustenance of violent conflict. Some quantitative studies
have found strong causal relationships between rainfall
variation or temperature increase and violent conflict,
although the methodological approach taken by these
studies has been challenged, and such quantitative
approaches also rest on an implicit assumption that the
past will be a guide to the future – which may be incorrect,
given the potential for abrupt, non-linear changes in the
future, as discussed in the section on climate change earlier
in the paper.107 Alternatively, cases can be identified in
which scarcity has played a role, for instance competition
for land in the run-up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide or
the disputed elections in Kenya in 2008, or the role of both
water and land as conflict threat multipliers in Ethiopia and
Darfur.108
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In many cases, the risk of violent conflict that arises from
resource scarcity has less to do with disputes over the
control of natural resources themselves, than with the
livelihoods that they enable. One widely discussed example
of this is the example of piracy off the coast of Somalia,
where it has been argued that depletion of fisheries due
to over-exploitation by fleets from other countries has led
to fishing communities taking up piracy as an alternative
livelihoods strategy.109
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Why is multilateral cooperation needed?
The multilateral system’s involvement in issues of
development, state fragility and emergency response is
already vast. In the development context, for example,
OECD DAC countries spent just under a quarter of their
total development aid through multilateral institutions
between 2004 and 2006.110 In the conflict context, nearly
80,000 peacekeepers are deployed to conflict-affected
states through the UN, costing $8 billion a year.111 The UN
humanitarian system will spend the same amount again
this year through the Consolidated Appeals Process.112
24
At the same time, as just noted, poor people and poor
countries will be disproportionately impacted by scarcity
– a theme that comes up again in each of the other three
policy areas discussed in this part of the paper. Climate
change will hit hardest on low latitudes, where most
developing countries are located. Poor people and poor
countries have the greatest vulnerability to environmental
shocks and stresses, just as for kinds of shocks and stresses.
They spend more of their resources on food and fuel, and
are more exposed to commodity price inflation. They have
less capacity to organize to secure fair shares, whether in
local, national or international settings.
So given that the multilateral system is already heavily
involved in supporting poor people and poor countries,
and that these actors have such a direct stake in effective
management of climate change and scarcity, it follows
that the multilateral system will increasingly need to
take account of scarcity in all its work in poor countries
– whether humanitarian relief, conflict prevention and
response, long term development, or indeed provision of
global public goods. What does this involve in practice?
What are the key tasks for multilateral cooperation?
Once again, it bears repeating that scarcity issues will
rarely, if ever, be experienced in isolation from other
risk drivers. This means that policy responses must be
equally integrated. The list of actions below is not just an
agenda for action on scarcity, therefore, but in some ways
an agenda for development itself in a world increasingly
characterized by risk – of which scarcity is just one aspect.
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Key Multilateral Tasks for Managing Scarcity: Protecting
Poor People and Fragile States
Short term (e.g. actions that could be agreed at summit
meetings in 2011 or 2012)
•
Increase international humanitarian assistance capacity
and funding
•
Scale up social protection systems, safety nets, etc.
•
Build international donor capacity for analysis of natural
resource governance, political economy and conflict risk
dimensions of scarcity
•
Scale up work on girls’ education, access to reproductive
health services, women’s empowerment and other
sectors that can help reduce unsustainable population
growth
Medium term (actions requiring greater political heavy
lifting, likely to take 3-5 years)
•
Move towards a more integrated approach to building
across development programs
•
Build scarcity issues into conflict response strategies
Key questions and issues
•
Need for more concrete examples of low carbon,
climate-resilient growth
•
Need for integrated assessment of finance for
development needs (see next section)
•
What happens if scarcity develops to the point at which
social protection systems are insufficient for protecting
poor people?
Short term tasks
To start with, the multilateral system will need to scale up
humanitarian assistance capacity to cope with scarcity.
Today, a rough rule of thumb sometimes used by UN
humanitarian practitioners is that global emergency relief
systems can reach up to 100 million people to at one time.
The food / fuel spike saw these capacities severely tested.
Even before the spike, the World Food Programme was
helping 73 million people in 78 countries; the food crisis
then increased the number of undernourished people by
well over 100 million, to over a billion in total.113
As scarcity increases, then, humanitarian relief may need
to assist many more than 100 million. Exact estimates are
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
impossible, but a potential doubling of capacities over the
next 10-15 years is probably a reasonable starting point.
At the same time, the humanitarian system will need to
be ready to deal with different kinds of challenge. In the
past, emergency relief has generally come after violent
conflict or a natural disaster. Scarcity issues will change
this context significantly. The food price spike provided a
taste of the future: as World Food Programme executive
director Josette Sheeran observed at the time, “there
is food on the shelves but people are priced out of the
market … there is vulnerability in urban areas that we
have not seen before.”114
To cope with these changing circumstances, emergency
relief is likely to need:
•
•
•
Additional financial resources. WFP nearly ran out of
funds during the peak of the food price spike, when
it had to raise $755 million of additional funding just
to continue feeding people already dependent on it.
In 2009, the agency needed approximately $6 billion
– a 20 % increase on 2008 (itself a record year). The
importance of funds being available in advance is also
likely to increase.
Improved co-ordination. Humanitarian agencies will
have to work with a wider range of governments
and international agencies as scarcity evolves.
Humanitarian co-ordination structures must also cope
with spikes in their own running costs, and potentially
also with wider economic volatility (for example in
exchange rates, costs for insurance and the potential
effects of export bans).
Re-conceptualizing. As humanitarian agencies find
themselves helping victims of scarcity-driven slow
onset stresses, the line between humanitarian
relief and social protection (see below) will become
increasingly blurred – driving new complexities
in funding and co-ordination, but potentially also
creating new opportunities for improved delivery.
The UN humanitarian system should start planning now
for the how caseloads may grow and evolve. The UN Office
for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) is
best placed to undertake this analytical work, and should
be mandated by the UN Secretary-General to carry out a
full review of how needs will change in the light of scarcity
issues.
Second, there is a need to scale up social protection
systems and safety nets as a way of building resilience.
Social protection is usually defined as public actions carried
out by the state or privately that can enable people to deal
more effectively with risk, vulnerability to crises or change,
and that help to tackle chronic or extreme poverty.115 The
proportion of people who currently enjoy access to social
protection is very low – around 20% of people globally.116
Social protection policies are often classified into two
categories: social insurance, where social security is
financed by contributions and based on the insurance
principle of pooling risk; and social assistance, where
public actions transfer resources to needy people.117 In
practice, it can take a huge range of forms, including cash
and in-kind transfers, employment guarantee schemes,
mother and child health & nutrition or school feeding
programs, weather-indexed crop insurance, micro-finance
or social pensions.118
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Such policies have a valuable role to play in managing
scarcity. Food and energy security is not just about the
total amount of food or oil that is produced globally, but
crucially also who is able to access these goods. (As the
economist Amartya Sen once observed, “Starvation is the
characteristic of some people not having enough to eat.
It is not the characteristic of there not being enough to
eat.”)119
The food / fuel price spike sharply reduced the access of
poor people to food and fuel, and led to unrest in many
countries – at least 46 of which imposed either price
controls (which distorted markets and removed incentives
for increased supply) or economy-wide subsidies (leading
to inflationary impacts and serious budget shortfalls). As
the UN food task force argued at the time, social protection
systems targeted at the poorest and most vulnerable
people could have offered a far more affordable and
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targeted way, with fewer unintended side effects.120 At the
same time, as Nicholas Stern has argued, social protection
systems are also increasingly seen as potentially forming a
core element of climate adaptation strategies.121
Scaling up social protection will require financial resources
and harmonization across aid donors, but it will also require
them to take a politically sophisticated approach. The key
barriers to social protection systems are often political, not
technical: elites may oppose them out of fears that they
will encourage dependency, for example (the evidence
actually suggests the opposite).122
26
A third task is building international donor capacity
for analysis of natural resource governance, political
economy and conflict risk dimensions of scarcity.
As already noted, the impact of scarcity issues in fragile
states needs to be seen in a broad political, economic
and social context. Getting involved in such politicized
areas presents challenges for aid donors. Many find it
easier to concentrate on ‘safe’ areas – for example seeing
development assistance as primarily about disbursing
money rather than exercising influence, or concentrating
on relatively technical areas of governance such as public
financial management systems.
But as scarcity increases, donors will find themselves forced
to engage with tough debates about resource rights, given
that in many countries the default outcome will be for the
poor to end up the losers, because of their lack of political
clout. The first step towards this engagement is for donors
to have as full an understanding as possible of the country
context, together with a clear-sighted recognition of the
fact that donors themselves are always political actors,
never neutral bystanders.
The capacity for this kind of analysis is becoming
an increasingly central plank of progressive donors’
engagement in poor countries – the UK Department for
International Development (DFID), for example, now
uses ‘drivers of change’ analysis as a basis for developing
Country Assistance Programs in all countries where it
operates. The next step is for donors to bring scarcity
issues to the heart of these analyses, mapping the
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outlook on resource scarcity against indicators of human
vulnerability, economic impact, conflict risk and so on,
with particular attention to the governance regimes that
countries apply to resources such as land and water. (The
Center on International Cooperation is in the process of
producing pilot studies for what such integrated country
assessments would look like in practice.)
Finally, there is a pressing need for donor agencies to do
more to address unsustainable population growth in
key low income countries. Population is one of the most
sensitive issues in development, involving as it does highly
personal questions about sexual behavior and women’s
empowerment. Discussion of population growth can
also raise acute fears, whether because of the draconian
approach that some countries have taken to the issue (for
example, China’s one child policy), or because of accounts
of environmental degradation that lay the blame with
poor people for ‘reproducing too much’ rather than with
OECD countries or the world’s middle class for ‘consuming
too much’.
Yet as discussed earlier in the paper, the fact remains that
some of the world’s poorest and most fragile states face
some of the least sustainable rates of population growth.
If unaddressed, these rates of growth will greatly intensify
the problem of managing scarcity; slower population
growth, on the other hand, can buy more time to adapt,
particularly in the face of the coming impacts of climate
change.123
Moreover, the evidence shows that far from requiring
draconian approaches, the process of development itself
tends to reduce fertility rates. In particular, policies to
improve girls’ education, women’s empowerment and
access to reproductive health services have a particularly
important role to play on this agenda, and should be
regarded as priority areas for support by international
donors.
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
Medium term tasks
further conflict in the future.127 These issues are returned
to in more detail later in the paper.
In the medium term, the key task for the multilateral
system is to move towards a more integrated approach
to building resilience across development programs.
A wide range of work on this front is already underway:
recent years have seen greatly increased attention paid to
climate adaptation, peacebuilding, disaster risk reduction,
statebuilding and social protection, for example, all of
which are fundamentally concerned with managing risks
to poor people and development. Such measures can have
a transformative effect: the most recent science findings
on the effects of climate change on hunger, for instance,
show that while hunger may increase by 10-20% because
of climate change, effective adaptation could reduce the
number to 5%.124
But much remains to be done to mainstream these
resilience-focused areas of work through national
development strategies. For fragile states, in particular, a
paradox will be the fact that successful resilience-building
will depend on the resource that by definition they lack:
institutional capacity.
Much also remains to be done to explore the synergies
between the different elements of the ‘resilient
development agenda’. International Alert, for example,
has argued that “peacebuilding and adaptation are
effectively the same kind of activity, involving the same
kinds of methods of dialogue and social engagement,
requiring from governments the same values of inclusivity
and transparency.”125 DFID recently undertook a major
program of work to explore the links – and potential
tensions – between statebuilding and peacebuilding.126
The other key medium term task centers on building
scarcity issues into conflict response strategies – such as
mediation, peacekeeping or post-conflict reconstruction.
International actors need to invest in improving the capacity
of conflict specialists – whether mediators, peacekeepers
or peace-builders – to understand the role of scarcity in
conflicts, and build this in to their approaches, both to
avoid doing harm or creating unintended consequences,
and to seek to reduce these drivers’ potential to cause
Key questions and issues
On the analytical front, multilateral actors need to work to
develop a clearer and more tangible idea of what the
vision of ‘low-carbon, climate-resilient growth’ actually
means. It is already clear that climate change and scarcity
issues will radically alter the context for development in the
future. Agriculture will need to become more sustainable,
and less reliant on inputs like water or fertilizer. Developing
country governments will need to find ways of improving
their citizens’ access to energy without locking them in
to increasingly expensive and decreasingly sustainable
infrastructures. Communities, countries and regions will
need to become more resilient to an increasingly turbulent
world, with scarcity and climate change foremost among
the drivers of change.
Developed countries must take the lead in tackling the
root causes of many of these challenges, at least in areas
such as reducing emissions, where there is a moral and
a political imperative for them to do most to tackle the
problem they did most to create. Yet there is also the
potential for developing countries to pursue growth
paths that learn from developed countries’ mistakes, and
position themselves to gain from the opportunities of the
future.
27
There are few examples of countries demonstrating what
it means to tackle these challenges successfully on the
ground (not least since developed countries have so far
conspicuously failed to ‘take a lead’ on climate change).
Accordingly, the potential exists for international actors
to support developing countries in ambitious pilot
projects that show what could be achieved. Costa Rica
is an example of what can be done: the country already
generates 80% of its electricity from renewable sources,
and is racing countries including Norway, Iceland and New
Zealand to become the first wholly carbon neutral country
in the world.128 The World Bank-administered Climate
Investment Funds are also focusing increasingly on
country-level approaches, for instance the Pilot Program
on Climate Resilience (PPCR).129
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28
At the same time, multilateral actors will also need to
reassess overall finance for development needs in
light of scarcity. Existing estimates of aid requirements in
poor countries (and indeed the long-standing target for
OECD countries to allocate 0.7% of gross national income
to aid) will clearly be affected by the substantial price tags
attached to objectives such as scaling up access to energy
at the same time as reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
increasing investment in agriculture, adapting to climate
change and dramatically improving access to social
protection systems. This issue is covered in more detail in
the next section.
will on the part of policymakers and publics to face up
to the much deeper issues of fairness involved – an issue
returned to later in the paper.
Finally, a question for the longer term is what happens
if scarcity issues develop to the point at which social
protection systems prove insufficient for protecting
poor people? As discussed above, social protection
systems and safety nets have a key role to play in
protecting poor people from price spikes and other shocks
and stresses. But it is also possible to imagine conditions in
which even universal social protection coverage might still
leave many poor people unable to cover their basic needs.
Start with energy systems, the most expensive of the
three areas. As the first part of the paper noted, from
a scarcity perspective the key energy security concern
centers on oil supplies – both because of the risk of a short
term supply crunch as a result of under-investment, and
because of longer term worries about when global oil
production will peak.
Imagine, for example, a future recurrence of the
conditions that led to the food price spike of 2008, but
with some or all of the following additional elements, all
of which are feasible or even predictable in the next two
decades: global population of a billion higher than today;
global average warming of 2° Celsius, with reduced crop
yields in high as well as low latitudes; volatile swings in
precipitation patterns, including an outright failure of the
South Asian monsoon; and global oil production down
to 75 million barrels, with significant unmet demand and
dramatic knock-on consequences for fertilizer costs, the
economics of biofuels.
In this situation, poor people with access to basic social
protection could nonetheless still find themselves priced
out of the market for key foodstuffs. The issue would be less
one of absolute poverty than of lower relative purchasing
power in conditions of scarcity – in other words, a problem
of inequality coupled with a context of limits. While social
protection provision might be better than nothing in such
circumstances, it would be no substitute for a collective
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Finance and Investment
What do climate change and scarcity mean for
investment and finance?
Scarcity and climate change will require massive
investment in energy systems, agriculture and improved
resilience, especially in developing countries.
But the need to respond to climate change means that
the policy challenge is not simply to create a framework
for increasing the amount of investment going towards
upstream oil production. For one thing, meeting the
projected 1% a year demand increase for oil is hard to
reconcile with limiting temperature increase to 2º Celsius.
For another, meeting this demand forecast would require
more and more liquid fuel to come from unconventional
sources, such as oil sands – which are themselves far
more energy-intensive to produce, with emissions 2147% higher than those from conventionally produced
petroleum fuels – or deepwater drilling.130
Instead, the key policy requirement is to fulfill energy
security needs while at the same time reconciling them
with the need to stabilize the climate. Rather than simply
increasing oil supplies, policymakers must embrace a
whole range of alternatives, ranging from more efficient
vehicles, and improved public transport through to
electric or hydrogen powered cars.
As the latter two examples show, it is not enough just
to look at the investment required in the transportation
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
sector: a much more holistic approach is needed. Today,
admittedly, energy demand from transport is largely
separable from energy demand from power generation,
households and industry. Transport relies largely on oil
products (and will account for most future demand for oil);
power generation, industry and the household sector, on
the other hand, rely mainly on coal, natural gas, nuclear,
renewables and hydro.131
But in future, this boundary will become increasingly
blurred. Electric cars will reduce demand for oil while
increasing demand for electricity – and increasing the
importance of whether that electricity is generated from
coal, gas, nuclear or renewables. The same point would
apply if a significant number of cars were fuelled by
hydrogen (also derived from electricity, via the process of
electrolysis). Similarly, if energy security concerns led more
countries to produce liquid fuels from coal (as Germany
had to during World War 2), this would increase demand
and hence prices for a fuel currently used primarily for
power generation, not vehicles.
The consequence of these market transformations is that
policymakers concerned to reduce the risks of oil price
volatility will increasingly need to look at the price tags for
energy systems as a whole – whether or not they are also
concerned to mitigate climate change.
The sums involved are astronomical. Simply to meet
projected energy demand in the 2009 World Energy
Outlook’s Reference Scenario, the IEA estimates that
cumulative investment of $26 trillion (in 2008 dollars)
would be needed between now and 2030.132 However,
the Reference Scenario takes no account of the cost of
reducing emissions (and would hence put the world
on track for a temperature increase of up to 6º Celsius).
To meet projected energy demand and limit average
warming to 2º Celsius, the cost rises to some $36.5 trillion
over the next two decades. 133
Much of this investment will be needed in developing
countries, where most of the growth in demand for energy
will take place. Non-OECD countries account for all of the
projected growth in demand for oil between now and
2030, and for all of the projected increase in emissions over
the same period.134
At the same time, there is also much to be done to scale
up access to energy in developing countries. 1.4 billion
people currently lack access to electricity, 85% of them in
rural areas.135 In Sub-Saharan Africa, where the challenge
is greatest, the electrification rate is just 31%, with 80% of
people relying on traditional biomass energy (wood, dung
and so on). The IEA estimates in its 2010 World Energy
Outlook that achieving universal access to modern energy
systems by 2030 would require additional investment of
$756 billion ($36 billion per year) – less than 3% of the total
required over this period in the IEA’s ‘New Policies’ scenario.
However, actual levels of total current investment in
energy are far less than is needed. Part of the reason is
the tough financing environment that has followed the
credit crunch. In the context of oil specifically, a key factor
is the decline in prices since 2008: current levels of around
$80 per barrel are also only just above the level at which
oil production from sources such as tar sands in Canada
or deep water wells off the coast of Angola become
economic, for example.136 But a third part of the reason for
current inadequate investment levels – and arguably the
one that policymakers can do most to rectify – is the lack
of ‘signals from the future’ for investors about the extent of
future emissions controls.
29
Capital stock lifetimes for power stations, refineries and
other kinds of energy infrastructure are typically several
decades long. Accordingly, energy sector investors need
clear indications of how much future demand for (say)
oil or coal-fired electricity will be curtailed by future
climate policy. Unfortunately, the Copenhagen climate
summit fell well short of giving investors this long-term
predictability.137 Accordingly, it becomes rational for
investors to reduce their exposure to political uncertainty,
for example by concentrating investment in technologies
with rapid payback times – such as gas-fired power stations
– rather than those with longer payback times, like nuclear,
wind power or many forms of energy efficiency.
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Admittedly, political concerns on energy security and
peak oil will drive changes in energy systems even
without a comprehensive international climate regime.
Unfortunately, though, there is nothing to say that energy
security must necessarily be low-carbon. To take one
example, the technology has long existed to derive liquid
fuels from coal – which could reduce countries’ reliance
on foreign oil, but at a severe cost in climate change
terms. Similarly, while electric power can be used to run
vehicles, the electricity can (as noted above) be generated
as easily from coal-fired power stations as from nuclear or
renewable energy.
In all, then, the policy requirement is for governments
to jump-start the emergence of a low-carbon economy,
which would simultaneously address energy security and
climate change concerns. Achieving this requires a much
more favorable investment climate, however; the paper
returns shortly to the question of what this would require
from the multilateral system.
30
Agriculture is the second key area in which investment is
needed. As noted earlier, the productivity gains driven by
the agricultural ‘Green Revolution’ during the 20th century
have shown signs of running out of steam in recent years –
just as demand is rising rapidly in line with rising affluence
and a growing global population.
A 21st century ‘Green Revolution’ will need to replicate
the improvements in crop yields made by its 20th century
predecessor. But it will also need to achieve three more
objectives. First, it must be far more resource-efficient.
Agriculture, more than any other sector, is where the battle
on water security will be won or lost: as noted earlier,
it accounts for 70% of human water use. Agriculture’s
reliance on fossil fuels and high greenhouse gas emissions
will also need to be reduced dramatically.
Second, a 21st century Green Revolution must be resilient
to the shocks and stresses that can be expected in years
to come, especially changing weather patterns. Third
and finally, it must reduce poverty: three quarters of the
world’s poor live in rural areas, and the countries in which
the greatest potential for productivity improvements
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exists are those that missed out on the 20th century Green
Revolution, particularly in Africa and Asia.
One of the most important areas for investment is
improving producers’ access to markets – a broad
category of tasks that includes upgrading transport and
distribution infrastructure (everything from rural roads
to ports) as well as mechanisms to allow small farmers to
aggregate their output in order to sell to large purchasers
like supermarkets or global food companies. A second
priority is investing in access to knowledge, particularly
through scaling up rural extension services that can diffuse
science and technology innovations out to producers in
the countryside. Other key areas for investment are access
to credit, access to risk management and access to assets
(including land and water).138
As with energy, agricultural objectives are challenged by
a historical problem of under-investment. The proportion
of official development assistance going to agriculture
fell from 17% of the total in 1980 to 3% in 2006; the
amount of public investment in agricultural research and
development has roughly halved over the last 15 years;
and despite the fact that some of the greatest potential
gains in agricultural productivity are to be found in Africa,
in 2008 only 4.5% of public sector spending there went on
agriculture, despite an African Union target to spend 10%
of public expenditure on agriculture by 2008.139 At the
same time, while private sector investment in developing
country agriculture has increased markedly, there have
been concerns over whether such investments benefit
the host country, and particularly poor people (an issue
discussed in the International Trade section of the paper).
In future, the Food and Agriculture Organization suggests
that roughly $30 billion a year is needed to improve
agricultural productivity in low income countries, while
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has put the same
figure at $15-20 billion. These estimates would put the
total between now and 2030 in the range of $420 billion,
using the upper end of the UNSG’s estimated range – an
order of magnitude lower than the amounts that the IEA
estimate are needed in the energy sector, but a massive
sum nonetheless.
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
The third key area where finance and investment is needed in order to manage scarcity issues is adapting to climate change. As just discussed, much of the investment
needed in order to cope with climate change will be targeted at the agricultural sector as part of a broader push
to produce more food in a more sustainable and more
resilient way. But adaptation will also be a much broader endeavor, involving tackling vulnerability across the
board in developing countries (and indeed developed
ones) and seeking to improve resilience.
In financing terms, there is a lively – and as yet unresolved
– debate about the price tag attached to climate adaptation in developing countries. The World Bank has estimated that $9-41 billion a year will be needed between
2010 and 2015; the Stern Review, $4-37 billion; the UN
Development Programme, $86-109 billion; the UNFCCC
Secretariat, $27-66 billion.140 More recently, a major
study undertaken by the Grantham Institute for Climate
Change and the International Institute for Environment
and Development argued that all of these estimates are
substantially lower than is warranted, and that the true
cost of climate adaptation is likely to be between two and
three times higher than the figure suggested by the UNFCCC Secretariat.141
to take advantage of the change. Low carbon investment,
in turn, makes policy action more palatable, creating a
virtuous circle. This in turn requires a longer term and more
credible approach to climate policy, for example basing
global climate targets on longer term commitment periods
or enhancing the robustness of compliance mechanisms.
Finally, governments have a role in protecting poor people
from the effects of climate change and scarcity, given
their disproportionate vulnerability. Given that private
sector investors will tend not to have incentives to invest
in helping poor people become more resilient, it is for
governments to fill the gap, whether through direct public
financing or regulatory frameworks that seek to direct
private sector flows towards the same end.
All three of these areas are trans-boundary in nature. No
country can achieve total internalization of climate and
environmental costs on a unilateral basis: it would incur
a cost to competitiveness that would prove impossible in
both economic and political terms. On the adaptation side,
meanwhile, the fact that poor countries lack the resources
to cope with climate change and its wider effects on
scarcity makes for a compelling case for multilateral
support to the most vulnerable countries.
Why is multilateral cooperation needed?
Short term tasks
What will be the role of governments on mobilizing the
investment needed – and when will they need to act
collectively? In essence, there are three answers. First,
they have a role in tackling market failures, most obviously
the lack of consistent pricing on carbon or water. Taking
policy action to rectify these externalities through price
signals in turn has an impact on the investments at which
finance is directed.
The single most important multilateral task on financing
and investment is to move forward with a comprehensive
global deal on post-2012 commitments. However,
following the weak outcome of Copenhagen, it appears as
though this deal may be out of reach for the next two years
or so (as a result of which it is discussed in the section on
medium term tasks below). So what can policymakers start
on immediately?
Second, governments can facilitate efficient private
sector investment through improving long term investor
certainty – through sending ‘signals from the future’ that
can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If governments can
convince private firms and citizens that a rapid transition
to a low carbon world is now inevitable, then these actors
have a powerful incentive to ensure they are positioned
To begin with, they can pursue a range of climate
adaptation and mitigation actions that can move
forward without a comprehensive global deal. On the
financing side, developed countries committed under the
Copenhagen Accord to provide resources “approaching
$30 billion for the period 2010-2012” to support
developing countries’ climate efforts on both adaptation
and mitigation.
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What are the key tasks for multilateral cooperation?
Key Multilateral Tasks for Managing Scarcity: Finance
and Investment
Short term (e.g. actions that could be agreed at summit
meetings in 2011 or 2012)
•
Pursue key climate adaptation and mitigation actions
that can move forward without a comprehensive global
deal
•
Accelerate investment in a 21st century ‘Green
Revolution’
•
Scale up research & development spending on both
energy and agriculture
Medium term (actions requiring greater political heavy
lifting, likely to take 3-5 years)
•
Move to longer term commitment periods and a more
robust compliance regime in global climate policy
•
Agree a global climate stabilization target
•
Equitable and binding targets for developing countries
within a global emissions budget
32
Key questions and issues
•
Need for re-assessment of finance for development
needs in light of scarcity
•
Need for new financing sources (e.g. emissions trading)
As at the beginning of October 2010, developed countries’
‘fast start’ funding pledges came to $27.9 billion – a
significant step towards the total pledged.142 However,
important caveats apply. It is not yet clear how the money
will be split between mitigation and adaptation; not all
pledges are ‘new and additional’, as they are supposed
to be; it is not clear that donor countries will meet a
commitment to target spending at the most vulnerable
countries.143
In sectoral terms, a range of mitigation actions can also
be pursued without a comprehensive global deal. One
of the best examples of these is reducing emissions from
deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) – an area
that poses quite different challenges from other kinds
of emissions reduction. There are also arguably good
reasons for actively seeking to deal with REDD separately
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from negotiations over national emissions targets. Rather
than incentivizing REDD projects by crediting them with
emissions trading permits, a better approach may be
to finance avoided deforestation separately, through
developed countries providing direct financial incentives
for developing nations to conserve their forests.144
Another example of an area of climate mitigation
investment that countries could move ahead with now is
action to reduce emissions of ‘black carbon’ (soot), which
accelerates global warming by reducing the amount
of sunlight reflected back into space, but which is not
a greenhouse gas and is not covered under the Kyoto
Protocol.145
On agriculture, secondly, policymakers need to accelerate
investment in the 21st century Green Revolution
described above. This investment will need to come from
a plurality of sources. Part of the picture will be scaling up
the proportion of development aid spent on agriculture
and rural livelihoods.
The G8 L’Aquila Summit in 2009 made a good start in
scaling up development assistance to agriculture, pledging
$20 billion over three years.146 However, not all the money
pledged is for agriculture; a substantial proportion will be
for humanitarian assistance and access to food. Both of
these areas are essential, but mean that the G8’s pledge is
further from meeting the estimated $20 billion a year that
might be needed in agriculture. There are also concerns
that a number of key donor countries may not live up to
their L’Aquila pledges – including the United States, which
despite strong leadership from the Obama Administration
on food, faces challenges in getting its spending pledges
through Congress.
Philanthropic donors have also become major players
in agriculture (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in
Africa, for example, was set up by the Rockefeller and
Gates Foundations rather than by bilateral or multilateral
donors), and are likely to see their significance continue to
grow. Last year saw the Gates Foundation alone allocate
$316 million to agricultural development spending, with
the proportion likely to increase in future.147
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
At the same time, investment from the private sector and
from countries seeking to ensure security of supply for food
– such as China and South Korea – is emerging as a major
source of funds for agriculture in low income countries.
This has the potential to finance significant productivity
improvements, but much greater transparency is needed
– not only on where funds are going, but also about the
terms of such deals, given the concern about whether such
agreements represent a fair deal for the country ceding its
land or agricultural production. This issue is discussed in
more detail in the section on International Trade below.
Finally, a range of longer-term analytical tasks will need to
be undertaken on finance and investment. Of these, the
most important is likely to be scaling up research and development spending on both energy and agriculture.
Investment in public R&D in both areas has fallen
sharply in recent years. As noted earlier, the budget of
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR, the key co-coordinating body for public
investment in agricultural R&D) has fallen by around 50%
over the past 15 years.148 Public sector investment in
energy R&D, meanwhile, is at just two thirds of its 1980
level in real terms, while the International Energy Agency
warns that there is “growing evidence that the private
sector is, in current economic circumstances, slashing
spending on energy R&D.”149
The dangers of this under-investment are pressing. R&D
decisions must be taken today in order for key technologies
to be deployed by 2020. As an indicative assessment,
then, developed country policymakers should commit to
double public R&D spending on low carbon technologies
and sustainable agricultural innovation by 2015, and
quadruple it by 2020 – at the same time as working with
China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies to plan
road maps for technical deployment.150
Medium term tasks
As this section has already argued, a key reason for
investment shortfalls, particularly in the energy sector,
is investors’ lack of long-term certainty about what the
long term global energy future will look like – in terms
of both prices and technologies – and hence where they
should target their money. Governments can therefore
play a critical role in sending ‘signals from the future’ that
shape investors’ expectations about what the future is
likely to look like, influence where they allocate finance on
the basis of those expectations, and hence catalyze selffulfilling prophecies of a low-carbon economy.151
While governments could, in theory, take a range of
actions to increase investment levels in the oil sector (such
as agreeing a price floor for oil, as has been suggested
by George Soros and others), such approaches would do
nothing to address climate change. If, on the other hand,
policymakers manage to give investors greater confidence
about the long term predictability and credibility of global
climate policy, then investors can operate within a more
integrated policy framework, that marries both energy
security and climate mitigation objectives.
To begin tackling this objective, governments should
move to longer term commitment periods and a more
robust compliance regime in global climate policy.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, emission targets are agreed in
five year commitment periods – far shorter spans of time
than the multi-decade lifetimes of energy investments
such as power stations, oil and gas pipelines or even just
household insulation. By moving to longer commitment
periods, governments would reduce the gap between
policy and investment time horizons, thus reducing the
risk premium faced by investors.
33
At the same time, policymakers also need to make global
climate policy much more credible in order to maximize
their capacity to unlock private sector investment. At
present, the Kyoto Protocol’s compliance and enforcement
regime is weak, with countries that fail to meet their targets
only receiving a 30% fine in the subsequent commitment
period, and countries that are non-parties having a strong
incentive to free ride.152 One possible way of improving
the credibility of Kyoto’s compliance system would be
for countries to agree a multilateral approach to using
‘carbon tariffs’ – an issue discussed in the next section on
International Trade.
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Ultimately, a genuinely comprehensive global climate
framework – one that achieves the stated objective of the
1992 UN Climate Convention, “stabilization of greenhouse
gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would
prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the
climate system” – will need to quantify that stabilization
level by determining a ceiling for atmospheric
greenhouse gas concentrations. This has never been
done, as the task of setting such a target currently falls
down a crack between the IPCC (who argue that the level
of a global ceiling is a political decision about risk, not a
scientific call) and policymakers (who are reluctant to
touch the issue because it inevitably opens up the hugely
politicized question of developing country targets).
34
However, policymakers could start to break the deadlock
by setting up an independent body to advise on the level
of a global stabilization target, that would complement
the IPCC’s role on the problem of climate change by
advising on the form of the solution.153 This could then
provide the basis for defining the size of a safe global
emissions budget – which would then need to be shared
out between the world’s countries.
For now, this objective seems politically unattainable,
given that tackling it would entail grasping hold of
the difficult issue of binding targets for developing
countries. However, the risk of the current situation, with
developing countries refusing to countenance quantified
targets before 2020 at the earliest, is that they may find
that most or all of the available carbon budget to 2050 has
by that point been used up.154
Most developing countries have nonetheless persuaded
themselves that it is in their interests to delay discussion
on targets – leading to the ludicrous position where very
low emitters in the G77 are defending the right of China to
avoid setting a clear trajectory for when its emissions will
peak. To break the deadlock, developed country leaders
could signal to developing countries that they will create
the option for them to take on quantified emission quotas
on a voluntary basis – with access to carbon markets for
those currently below their target. This policy would
establish the following principles:
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•
First, that binding targets can be profitable for
developing countries if set according to fair and
transparent criteria. Assuming equitable allocations
(see below), global emissions trading could be a
massive new source of finance for development, that
could ultimately dwarf aid flows.
•
Second, that quotas can be set above current
emissions levels, so that carbon markets ‘compensate’
low emitters while providing them with powerful
incentives to adopt a low carbon development
trajectory.
•
Third, that these principles can all fit within the
overall framework of a gradual, managed process of
convergence of rich and poor world emission rights,
within a safe global emissions budget.155
Building consensus around these principles will be a slow
process that requires real political leadership from both
sides. So far, there has been no sign that the UNFCCC
negotiating process is able to cope with such politicized
issues – although the UN High-Level Panel on Global
Sustainability, chaired by Presidents Zuma of South Africa
and Halonen of Finland, may be able to unlock the politics
of these big picture dimensions of climate change.156
Key questions and issues
One of the most important overarching analytical
issues facing the multilateral system on the finance and
investment aspects of scarcity and climate change is the
need for a comprehensive reassessment of finance for
development needs in the light of scarcity.
As already described, a disproportionate amount of the
investment needed – in energy systems and climate
mitigation, in agriculture, and in building resilience to
climate change and other scarcity impacts – is needed
in developing countries. This raises the question of how
these investment needs relate to existing finance for
development needs – and in particular, to the longstanding target that OECD countries should give 0.7% of
Gross National Income to development assistance.
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
Many commentators argue that climate finance to
developing countries – for both mitigation and adaptation
– should be additional to development assistance. At the
same time, investment needs arising from scarcity are not
wholly separable from existing development strategies;
rather, they are about achieving current development
objectives differently, taking account of the increasing
importance of scarcity on the way. This is perhaps clearest
in the case of climate adaptation, where there is a clear
tension between calls for adaptation to be ‘mainstreamed’
through all other areas of development activity and the
prospect of adaptation finance being dealt with separately
from aid flows.
The first question, then, is how much is needed overall?
One attempt that has been made to add up the total
costs of managing scarcity is set out by Jeffrey Sachs.157
is assessment of the total financing needs arising from
scarcity and related issues in developing countries is as
follows:
Table 4: Financial Needs for Managing Scarcity
(after Jeffrey Sachs)158
Global Goal
Financing Need
Illustrative
Annual Outlays
for Global
Cooperation
Climate change
mitigation
Adoption of
sustainable energy
systems, with
support for the
poorest countries
1.0 % of GNP
(donor countries)
0.5 % of GNP
(low-income
countries)
Climate change
adaptation
Assistance to support
the poorest countries
with adaptation
0.2 % of GNP
(donor countries)
Biodiversity
conservation
Financing of
protected areas
0.1 % of GNP
(donor countries)
Combating
desertification
Financial assistance
for water
management in lowincome dry lands
0.1 % of GNP
(donor countries)
Stabilizing
global
population
Assistance for
universal access to
reproductive health
services
0.1 % of GNP
(donor countries)
Science for
sustainable
development
Global public
financing of research
and development
of new technologies
for sustainable
development
0.2 % of GNP
(donor countries)
Millennium
Development
Goals
Assistance to help
the poorest countries
to escape from the
poverty trap
0.7 % of GNP
(donor countries)
Total
Budgetary
outlays
for global
sustainable
development
2.4 % of GNP
(donor
countries)
The figures set out in this table are rough estimates, as
Sachs himself underlines, and the table is also missing
the agricultural investment needs described above. Even
so, it is a useful indicator of the kind of assessment that is
required.
35
A process geared towards producing a more accurate
determination of the financing needs associated with
different scarcity issues – and the overlaps between them –
should be an early priority for policymakers. The UN HighLevel Panel on Global Sustainability provides an excellent
opportunity to take forward this agenda.
At the same time, a review of ‘finance for scarcity and
development’ should try to move towards resolution of
the outstanding, highly politicized questions of control
and accountability that currently bedevil discussions over
climate finance. An integrated review, covering both ‘how
much’ and ‘how’, should therefore be set up – involving
both developing countries and the key donor forums
(including the OECD Development Assistance Committee,
the UN Development Group, the UNFCCC Secretariat and
the World Bank). The High-level Advisory Group on Climate
Finance set up at Copenhagen, chaired by Prime Ministers
Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Jens Stoltenberg of Norway,
presents an opportunity to pick up the climate-specific
dimensions of the agenda, and again, the UN High-Level
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Panel on Global Sustainability is well placed to examine
the broader scarcity agenda.
International Trade
What do climate change and scarcity mean for
international trade?
As the global economy has become more efficient
and interconnected, it has also become less resilient.
Redundancies, buffers and margins of error have become
eroded. And as different parts of the global economy
become more tightly coupled, so it becomes easier for
perturbations to ripple through the system with surprising
speed.
This makes the global trade system more vulnerable to
acute shocks – and as the food and fuel spike that peaked
in 2008 showed, scarcity trends can certainly provide the
trigger for such shocks.
36
In the oil context during 2007 and 2008, for example,
tightness on the supply side combined with historically
low stock levels meant that actual or feared supply
interruptions – such as strikes in Venezuela, militant attacks
in Nigeria or regional security concerns in the Middle East
– exerted a higher than normal influence over prices in
volatile trading conditions, pushing prices up sharply.
In the food context, a tight supply / demand balance was
made much worse by government actions. More than 30
food producing countries reduced or suspended food
exports in response to domestic political pressures –
forcing prices still higher on world markets, while reducing
incentives for farmers to increase production. At the same
time, many import-dependent countries imposed price
controls, applied economy-wide subsidies or sought
urgently to build up their depleted food stocks – again,
pushing prices up still higher.159
Given the risks discussed earlier of even tighter supply /
demand balances in future, the risk of acute trade shocks
may increase too – particularly when policies designed to
firefight crises can so easily create positive feedback loops
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that worsen the problem. As the last section discussed,
poor countries and people are especially vulnerable to
these kinds of shock.
Over the longer term, a range of further risks stands out.
The broadest of these is the possibility that scarcity could
lead to countries losing confidence in the capacity of an
open international trading system to meet their needs
– and hence move towards a more mercantilist ‘resource
nationalism’. Already, a range of signals suggests the risk
of a slide in this direction, including intensifying inter-state
competition for energy, land, food and ‘virtual water’.
Another risk is the possible unilateral use of ‘carbon
tariffs’ (applying tariffs to imports in proportion to the
amount of carbon emitted in manufacturing them).
President Sarkozy of France has, since 2007, proposed
such tariffs as a way of penalizing countries that refuse
to take on emissions targets, a position seen by many
as aimed at the United States and possibly China (Prime
Minister Berlusconi of Italy has more recently added his
voice to these calls).160 More recently, the US WaxmanMarkey climate bill (which has passed the House of
Representatives, but currently remains stalled in the
Senate) set out detailed provisions for imposing “border
measures designed to avoid or minimize carbon leakage”
on countries that do not reduce their emissions at least as
fast as the US.161
As the World Bank has pointed out, however, unilateral
use of carbon tariffs could lead to a “proliferation of
trade measures dealing with other areas where the
competitive playing field is viewed as uneven”, and place a
disproportionate burden on low income countries.162
A third risk is that oil scarcity or future emission controls
could lead to a contraction in international trade.
Over the period of 2004 to 2008, transoceanic shipping
costs trebled – an increase in costs that, if compared to
trade tariffs, is equivalent to offsetting all of the trade
liberalization undertaken over the past three decades.163
Trade in agricultural goods is especially vulnerable to such
increases in the costs of shipping: a 2009 OECD working
paper, for example, noted that :
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
“Maritime transport costs represent a high proportion
of the imported value of agricultural products – 10%
on average, which is a similar level of magnitude as
agricultural tariffs. This study shows that a doubling
in the cost of shipping is associated with a 42% drop
in trade on average in agricultural goods overall.
The tendency to source imports from countries
with low transport costs is therefore strong. Trade
in some products is particularly affected by changes
in maritime transport costs, in particular cereals and
oilseeds, which are shipped in bulk.”164
In future, increased maritime transport costs could be
driven either by scarcer oil, or by tougher emission
controls. The aviation and maritime sectors – the arteries
of international trade – account for a rapidly rising share of
global emissions (albeit starting from a low base).165 While
both sectors were excluded from the Kyoto Protocol, future
global climate controls are likely to focus increasingly on
them.
In theory, rising energy costs and / or increasing controls
on maritime emissions could stimulate investment in
cleaner technology. Options for replacements for bunker
fuels do exist, including biofuels or liquefied natural gas
(LNG). In practice, though, these substitutes are somewhat
further from the market than clean alternatives in, say,
power generation (where renewables and nuclear are
already commercially deployed) or road transport (where
fuel efficiency technologies have improved substantially
in recent years, and electric or hydrogen vehicles hold out
the prospect of further improvements). A UK government
study concluded:
“it will be extremely challenging, and expensive, to
reduce emissions of CO2 from international shipping
and aviation … There are a number of options
available in each sector, but currently most of these
are not economically viable.”166
But unless these options do become economically viable,
increasing energy costs could effectively start to erode
international trade, simply because, as the former chief
economist of CIBC, an investment bank, puts it, “distance
costs money”.167 Already, media reporting suggests that
some global manufacturing companies are starting to
move from global to regional supply chains as a result
of rising energy costs.168 Such moves could have further
knock-on consequences for international trade in food,
especially for low income countries dependent on
imported grain.
Why is multilateral cooperation needed?
International trade is the example par excellence of the
kind of win that can arise from non-zero sum cooperation:
the existence of winners need not imply that someone
else must lose.169 But trade can also ‘tip’ into zero sum
competition between states – through tariffs, quotas,
export restrictions and other forms of protectionism.
Where international institutions can play a decisive role
is in creating enough trust between countries to increase
the chances of the former, and minimize the risk of the
latter. This makes it all the more significant, then, that the
world’s states have successfully constructed a rules-based
international trading system, backed up since 1995 by the
World Trade Organization – at its heart, a mechanism for
enforcing the continued existence of a global public good.
37
Scarcity issues present two threats to this state. Acute
trade shocks can lead countries to ignore shared interests
in favor of short term kneejerk policy responses that
worsen the problem. Over the longer term, scarcity can
undermine countries’ confidence in whether they can rely
on liberalized trade to meet their food and energy needs
– creating a risk of tipping from a non-zero sum to a zero
sum state in international trade.
While international institutions exist that could manage
these risks, they are currently configured in ways that
impedes their ability to do so. One example is the
International Energy Agency, created in 1974 as a
mechanism for managing emergency oil reserves to
reduce the risk of price spikes becoming wider economic
crises or of strategic competition for oil between importing
countries. Today, however, its membership remains limited
to the OECD countries that founded it. The emerging
economies that will account for all future growth in
demand for oil remain outside formal membership.
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Similarly, while the WTO has powerful enforcement
capacities, the rules that it polices are largely silent about
the kind of trade risks that arise from scarcity. The WTO
was essentially created as a way of resolving arguments
between countries about market access – the sorts of
dispute that arise in a buyer’s market, of the kind that
prevailed in agriculture until the beginning of the 21st
century. Faced with the disputes of a seller’s market,
however – concerned not with market access, but with
security of supply – the WTO was left largely on the
sidelines, impotent to intervene as the world trade system
was convulsed by export restrictions and frantic bidding
wars.
38
The risk of unilateral carbon tariffs shows a similar
underlying dynamic. In the end, the reason some
countries may opt for unilateral use of such tariffs is the
absence of a multilateral framework for managing climate
change. If it existed, there would be no need for individual
countries to act on concerns that tackling climate change
without comparable action from others would render
them uncompetitive. Again, the risk of zero sum outcomes
arises because of a failure to agree on collective policy
frameworks that create sufficient trust to enable non-zero
sum outcomes.
What are the key tasks for multilateral cooperation?
Policymakers can take a number of actions to increase the
trade system’s resilience to the effects of climate change
and scarcity – by no means all of which are dependent on
resurrecting the current ailing Doha trade negotiations
(although this will ultimately be necessary in order to
make progress on some fronts).
It is important to be clear, though, that while collective
action on trade can make some progress, it does not
represent a complete solution to the risks of zero sum
competition implied by scarcity issues – a challenge
returned to in the section below on strategic resource
competition.
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Key Multilateral Tasks for Managing Scarcity: Building a
Resilient Trade System
Short term (e.g. actions that could be agreed at summit
meetings in 2011 or 2012)
•
Bring emerging economies into full IEA membership
•
Scaling up food stocks (either real or virtual, at
multilateral or regional level)
•
Implement mechanisms to use intergovernmental peer
pressure to reduce the risk of export bans or restrictions
Medium term (actions requiring greater political heavy
lifting, likely to take 3-5 years)
•
Move forward with liberalization of developed country
farm support regimes
•
Agree terms of use for carbon tariffs to reduce the risk of
‘climate protectionism’
Key questions and issues
•
What will energy scarcity mean for international trade?
•
Will more countries come to regard increased selfsufficiency as more resilient than reliance on open
markets?
Short term tasks
As noted in the first part of the paper, the International
Energy Agency is already warning of the risk of a renewed
oil price spike in the short term. The dangers this would
pose – for the still-fragile global economic recovery, for
food prices, for poor countries and fragile states – make
this a top priority for policymakers to tackle. The most
immediate way of doing so would be to expand the
International Energy Agency’s membership to include
emerging economies, who will account for virtually all
growth in oil demand in the next two decades.
As noted, the IEA is, at its core, a mechanism for cocoordinating emergency oil reserves. Under the
Agreement on an International Energy Program – the IEA’s
enabling treaty, usually referred to as the ‘IEP Agreement’ –
IEA member governments must hold stocks equivalent to
90 days of net oil imports. In an emergency situation, they
must release oil from these stocks or take other action such
as restraining demand, switching to other fuels, increasing
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
domestic production or sharing oil with other members170
The IEA has used this mechanism to bring additional oil to
market only twice: once in 1991, in response to the Gulf
War, and again in 2005 following the disruption to Gulf of
Mexico production caused by Hurricane Katrina.171
But while the IEA has started to build a more engaged
relationship with emerging economies – including
through inviting China, India and Russia to attend the
Agency’s 2009 Ministerial meeting as full participants –
the IEP Agreement does not include emerging economies
as signatories.172 The risk of renewed oil price volatility
suggests it would be mutually advantageous to both OECD
and non-OECD countries for key emerging economies
to become full IEA members and so work towards the
construction of a buffer mechanism on oil that more
accurately reflects where future demand will be coming
from.
On food, a key gap during 2008 was the absence of
international strategic grain reserves that could have
provided buffer capacity when acute fears were at their
height. Instead, different countries have a patchwork of
domestic reserves. In some circumstances, nationally held
reserves can work: the Chinese government, for example,
holds higher grain stocks than many countries, and
argues that this helped it to avoid some of the turbulence
experienced by other importers during the price spike.173
But in many other countries, national grain reserves have
become politicized, used as a tool by interest groups or
fallen prey to corruption.
The most obvious approach to the problem might be to
create a physical, public, globally managed grain reserve
– a kind of IEA for food. As the International Food Policy
Research Institute points out, though, there are potential
disadvantages to such an approach, in particular high
storage costs and slow transactions. IFPRI has instead
proposed a decentralized regional emergency reserve
of grain for humanitarian donors, and a virtual reserve
and intervention mechanism based on coordinated
commitments by participating countries (in which
participating countries would undertake to supply funds
for intervention in world grain markets).174
One potential drawback of this approach is that it would
still leave import-dependent developing countries reliant
on the goodwill of exporters – with no guarantee that the
system would work during a serious crisis.
Another alternative again could be to set up a system of
regional food stocks, which would have the advantage
of being sited closer to areas of need. However, regional
stocks would also rely on exporters who, in the end, have
an interest in maintaining their trading partners’ reliance
on their produce.175
A third key area for action is the need for measures to
reduce the risk of sudden food export restrictions.
As already noted, the food price spike was worsened by
more than 30 key food producing countries imposing
restrictions on their exports; yet the WTO was left on
the sidelines since it lacks rules to prevent such panic
measures.
One option to manage this problem would be to agree
new WTO rules to prevent the use of export bans. Whilst
the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
the precursor to the WTO, does prohibit export bans and
restrictions other than “duties, taxes or other charges”,
it makes a specific exception for “export prohibitions
or restrictions temporarily applied to prevent or relieve
critical shortages of foodstuffs or other products essential
to the exporting contracting party.”176
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To be sure, there is nothing to say that WTO rules could not
be amended to remove this exception. Some analysts argue
that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
sets out a more restrictive approach to export restrictions
than do the equivalent WTO rules, for example.177 In
practice, though, such a move looks politically unlikely,
given the current state of multilateral trade negotiations.
Even if such a rule were agreed, moreover, governments
facing political emergencies over food prices might choose
to take their chances with the WTO’s dispute resolution
body and implement such measures anyway.
A more viable alternative, however, might be to implement
a mechanism to ‘name and shame’ countries using
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export bans, thus attempting to use peer pressure as a
countervailing force against sudden export restrictions.
Senior UN officials observe privately that the risk of public
embarrassment proved to be a helpful deterrent to export
restrictions in some cases during the 2008 food price
spike.178 Policymakers could usefully explore whether
such peer pressure could be systematized to prevent
future recurrences of the problems of 2008 – for instance,
through automatic referral of export restrictions to a
discussion in the G20.
Medium term tasks
40
While the measures described above could all potentially
be taken forward in the absence of progress more broadly
on the Doha trade round, liberalization of developed
country farm support regimes does remain a key priority
for developing countries’ food security – all the more
so, in conditions of scarcity. As the US-based Center for
Strategic & International Studies notes, the current global
agricultural trade system “structurally favors production
among wealthy countries and disadvantages producers in
poor developing countries”; redressing that balance needs
to become a strategic priority in the years ahead.179
The problem applies not only to developed country trade
barriers that discriminate against imports from developing
countries, but also to dumping of developed country
exports on developing markets – including through food
aid (the key reason why it is so crucial for the US to continue
to move away from food aid and towards providing cash
instead to humanitarian agencies such as the World Food
Programme).
The second key area for progress in the medium term is
the need for agreed terms of use for carbon tariffs. As
already described, carbon tariffs present a significant risk
of protectionism if used unilaterally. If used multilaterally,
however, they have the potential to be not only benign,
but a valuable component of a comprehensive global
climate regime.
Part of the reason is that carbon tariffs could help to
tackle ‘carbon leakage’ between countries. Caps on
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emissions in OECD countries can encourage production
to move to emerging markets, raising concerns over
both competiveness and environmental integrity. On the
other hand, much of this carbon is still consumed in the
developed world: the economist Dieter Helm estimates
that, although emissions produced in the UK have fallen
by over 12% since the Kyoto benchmark year of 1990, the
UK’s consumption of carbon actually increased by 19%
between 1990 and 2003.180
Other research suggests that only around half of China’s
rapid emissions growth is due to increased domestic
consumption, with the rest linked to exports. In effect,
selective constraints on emissions are distorting the
development patterns of both rich and poor countries,
providing an incentive for both sides to situate energy
intensive industries outside ‘tight cap’ locations.
Absent binding emission targets for all countries, carbon
tariffs offer a backstop against countries that fail to make
an adequate contribution to achieving a deal. While
unilateral use of tariffs could trigger a slide towards titfor-tat protectionism, a multilateral approach agreed by a
quorum of major emitters and other countries could avoid
these risks.
More fundamentally, it may be the only effective approach
to ensuring compliance with a global climate agreement
– including by countries that have refused to accede to
it. For this reason, governments should start to explore
how carbon tariffs can be applied in a way consistent
with wider global climate policy – while at the same time
reassuring each other than they will not use the measure
on a unilateral basis.
Key questions and issues
Overall, further investigation is needed on what increasing climate controls or energy scarcity are likely to
mean for international trade over the longer term. As
discussed, one possible implication is a move towards a
less globalized, more regional world as costs of shipping
goods by ship or air increase – but this remains highly
speculative, and there is a significant dearth of hard data.
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
If international trade does become increasingly constricted because of rising energy prices, then this would have
extremely far-reaching implications – whether for consumers facing higher food prices as they find themselves
with reduced access to international grain markets, or for
exporters of bulk commodities (including food) who may
find themselves having to reconsider their growth strategies. In particular, countries that currently rely on open
markets to meet their commodity needs could begin to
perceive increased levels of self-sufficiency as a more resilient alternative – a shift that could have far reaching implications for globalization and international relations.
Above all, it bears repeating that while action to build
resilience in the trade arena will be critical, it will not prove
a total solution. If scarcity increases markedly, the issue
will grow from one of managing perturbations in the trade
system to the larger and more risky ground of strategic
resource competition – the subject of the next section.
Strategic Resource Competition
What do climate change and scarcity mean for
strategic resource competition?
The final area of policy on which climate change and
scarcity will impact is strategic resource competition –
with, at worst, the risk of inter-state conflict. Each of the
key scarcity issues considered in this paper (water, land,
energy and climate change) comes with its own risks of
competition, summarized below.
Firstly, there is the potential for inter-state competition
for energy. The ‘scramble for energy’ between great
powers in areas including West Africa, Central Asia and
the South China Sea has been widely noted, prompting
the US to use its 2006 National Security Strategy to set out
an explicit warning to China not to try to “lock up” energy
supplies.181
At the same time, the US’s own actions have, at times, led
to similar worries in other countries, perhaps the clearest
example being the 2005 decision by Congress to block,
on national security grounds, an attempt by the Chinese
company CNOOC to acquire Unocal, a US oil company
with production rights over extensive reserves.182 Another
dimension of the issue is the growing importance of OPEC
oil producers and state-owned oil companies. The bulk of
future increase in world oil output is expected to come
from OPEC producers, rising from 44% in 2007 to 51% in
2030.183
The US National Intelligence Council’s 2008 report on
global trends to 2025 observed that “even actions short of
war will have important geopolitical implications as states
undertake strategies to hedge against the possibility that
existing energy supplies will not meet rising demand”,
noting trends including Chinese and Indian purchases
of equity stakes in energy fields, energy-deficient states
employing “transfers of arms and sensitive technologies
and the promise of a political and military alliance as
inducements to establish strategic relationships with
energy-producing states”, and increased naval competition
“in a zone extending from the Persian Gulf to East and
Southeast Asia”. As Michael Klare summarizes:
41
“…the leaders of most countries involved in the
great energy race have come to view the struggle
over hydrocarbon assets as a “zero sum” contest …
a zero-sum mentality leads to a loss of flexibility in
crisis situations, while the lens of nationalism turns
the pursuit of energy assets into a sacred obligation
of senior government officials.” 185
More recently, a similar dynamic has been seen in the
context of inter-state competition for land and food,
as import-dependent countries seek to agree overseas
security of supply deals for food or land. While there is
often a lack of transparency about such deals, among the
examples reported in the media are Chinese attempts to
secure 1.24 million hectares of land in the Philippines (in
a deal subsequently blocked), 700,000 hectares in Laos, 2
million hectares for biofuel production in Zambia and 2.8
million hectares for the same purpose in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.186 Other key food importers,
including the United Arab Emirates and South Korea, have
also sought to improve their good security with similar
deals. More acute forms of competition for food include
the export restrictions discussed in the previous section.
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At the same time, countries that are not dependent on
imported grain can also contribute to this emerging
competition for land and food through their own land
use policies: as already noted, the IMF, World Bank and
Goldman Sachs all argued in 2008 that the single most
significant driver of the food price spike was the diversion
of US agricultural land to biofuel production.187
On water, the key risk comes from trans-boundary
fresh water resources. Today, there are 263 rivers that
either span or delineate international borders.188 It is
important to note that so far, trans-boundary water
resources have tended to trigger cooperation rather than
conflicts between the countries that share them: research
by Oregon State University, for example, finds that
“cooperative interactions between riparian states over the
past fifty years have outnumbered conflictive interactions
by more than two-to-one.”189
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Another dimension of inter-state strategic resource
competition centers on the impacts of climate change,
and particularly the effects of rising sea levels. Current
international law on maritime borders awards countries
territorial rights extending 200 miles offshore from their
coastlines, for example – but is silent on what happens if
those coastlines recede because of climate change.195 This
grey legal area introduces the potential for future conflicts
over issues including:
•
Border disputes, including in the South China Sea and
the Gulf of Mexico;
•
Ownership of undersea energy resources (notably in
the Arctic);
•
Newly navigable waterways (such as the North-West
Passage and Northern Sea Route);
However, the same research also finds that 158 of the
world’s 263 international river basins “lack any type of
cooperative management framework.”190
Moreover,
with the prospect of climate change to consider, there
is no guarantee that the future will look like the past. A
particular concern here is the fact that many water-sharing
agreements are based on a set volume of water rather
than a percentage of what is available.191
•
The sovereignty rights, resource claims, and
populations of low-lying island states that disappear
under rising sea levels;
•
The fate of ‘climate refugees’, which some estimates
suggest could number 200 million by 2050 (although
the number is disputed, and UNHCR also questions
the very idea of ‘environmental refugees’).196
The risk of glacial retreat, most notably in the Himalayas,
has also triggered concern about future water-driven
conflict risks – as well as controversy, given the recent furor
over erroneous IPCC projections that 80% of Himalayan
glaciers would have disappeared by 2035. Existing glaciers
provide dry season water resources to 1.3 billion people
living in river basins including the Mekong, Irrawaddy,
Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Yellow River.192
As temperatures rise, some estimates (still valid, despite
the recent IPCC controversy) suggest the risk of future
dry season flow reductions of as much as 60-70% on the
Ganges.193 These kinds of forecast have led to increased
concern about the potential risk of capture of water
resources by particular countries (for instance in India,
where there are fears about the potential for China to dam
and divert the Brahmaputra river).194
Why is multilateral cooperation needed?
Of all of the areas of action considered in this paper, it is
in the context of strategic resource competition that the
case for multilateralism is clearest. While the extent of
globalization today may be unprecedented, conflict over
resources is one of the oldest stories in the book – and it
is, after all, preventing violent conflict between states that
forms the principal raison d’être of the UN system.
Even in scenarios that do not slide as far as war, the zero
sum competition that scarcity issues might prompt could
still lead to a steady erosion of multilateral effectiveness.
The food and fuel price spike demonstrated how the
political and economic impacts of scarcity can effectively
force states to ignore their long term shared interests
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
and focus instead on their individual, narrow, short term
interests – even when they understand that this will lead
to counterproductive consequences.
However, the scope for collective action between
governments is constrained by the views of their publics.
Climate change and scarcity are the antithesis of issues like
nuclear non-proliferation, which can viably be addressed by
a few dozen diplomats. Questions about the sustainability
of consumption, trade and investment patterns depend
on the decisions and behaviors of hundreds of millions
of companies, and billions of individual people – and the
political space that they cede to their governments for
agreeing collective approaches.
At present, the political space available is insufficient to
enable a genuinely comprehensive approach to managing
scarcity. Polling data show that public confidence in the
scientific consensus on climate change – arguably the
bedrock of any attempt to develop policy on scarcity – is
falling.197 Nor is there much sign that developed country
publics are yet willing to consider the idea of ‘fair shares’ to
finite global resources.
Governments therefore face a larger challenge than just
identifying what needs to be done to manage scarcity,
agreeing it, and implementing it (including international
institutional reform where necessary). More broadly, they
need to take their publics with them – by building shared
awareness of the nature of the challenge, and shared
platforms to move from recognition of the problem to
implementation of the solution: coalitions of governments,
international organizations and non-state actors that work
to open up the political space needed.
Governments must also be ready to move in the very short
term when political windows of opportunity materialize
– usually suddenly, and briefly. Given that the political
conditions for comprehensive solutions are not yet in
place, it is likely that impacts of one kind or another –
extreme weather events, price spikes and other shocks
and stresses – will play an important role in changing
political conditions.
These kinds of acute event can play out in either a positive
or a negative way. At best, they can have a transformative
attitude on public perceptions, creating a willingness
to ‘think the unthinkable’ and move forward with much
more ambitious action. At worst, they can lead to
counterproductive kneejerk reactions (again, the example
of food export restrictions stands out) – or simply to a failure
to capitalize on the window of opportunity, followed by a
wait for things to ‘return to normal’ without the root causes
of the crisis having been addressed. Accordingly, the issue
of readiness for crisis becomes crucial.
What are the key tasks for multilateral cooperation?
Seeking to contain the risk of strategic resource competition
is a broad area, and the kinds of actions involved in doing
so equally diverse. Nevertheless, a range of tasks can be
identified, including both specific tasks in the immediate
term and longer term agendas that will take time to build
up.
Short term tasks
43
In the immediate term, a key starting point is the need
for stress-testing of existing multilateral architecture
against climate change and scarcity. Already, a great
range of international organizations is exploring what
climate change will mean for them operationally – but the
same is not yet true for scarcity more generally.
In particular, the UN, World Bank and other international
organizations with broad remits should audit existing
governance arrangements at global, regional and national
level, to search for potential scarcity flashpoints in advance.
One example of a case where such auditing is needed is
international agreements for sharing freshwater resources,
as discussed above. The fact that 158 of the world’s
263 international basins lack any type of cooperative
management framework should prompt a wider range of
international policy actors to want to know where those 158
river basins are situated, how they map across to existing
conflict risk drivers, fragile states and concentrations
of vulnerability, what lessons could be applied in these
instances and so on – but nothing like such a systematic
approach is yet evident in the international system.
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Key Multilateral Tasks for Managing Scarcity: Containing
Strategic Resource Competition
Short term (e.g. actions that could be agreed at summit
meetings in 2011 or 2012)
•
Undertake stress testing of existing multilateral
architecture
•
Build up foresight and surprise anticipation capacities
•
Invest in resilience, e.g. development policies and trade
measures as discussed earlier
•
Start developing options for shared global operating
systems to manage scarcity
Medium term (actions requiring greater political heavy
lifting, likely to take 3-5 years)
•
Start building up international system bandwidth and
inter-agency interoperability
•
Commission relevant international agencies to produce
a joint World Resources Outlook
•
Develop political narratives centered on ‘fair shares’,
especially on food, energy and climate
44
Key questions and issues
•
Will policymakers be ready to take advantage of political
windows of opportunity for further-reaching action as
and when they open up?
More broadly, international organizations and national
governments alike need to tackle foresight, futures
analysis and surprise anticipation in a much more
rigorous way. As the policy analyst Leon Fuerth, a former
National Security Adviser to Al Gore, has put it:
“Leaders are not unmindful of the need to think of
the longer-term implications of their actions, but
they also know that representing the interests of
the future often involves significant political risk to
themselves in the present. Faced with such a choice,
they frequently take comfort from the bromide that
it is impossible to predict the future. That is certainly
true in a literal sense, but it obscures a much more
important fact: that it is entirely feasible to think
about the future in disciplined fashion and to reach
conclusions about it that ought to be important
factors in the making of contemporary policy.”198
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In particular, a ‘challenge function’ is needed within
the international system, with the task of analyzing
non-financial systemic risks, and designing options for
addressing them (thus complementing the work of the
Financial Stability Board on financial vulnerabilities). This
work would need to be tackled by an agile, flexible and
relatively independent ‘networked’ organization, able to
draw on external expertise, and reporting to a forum that
brings together national and international heads of policy
planning.
A third area of work, touched on in several places earlier in
the paper, is the need to focus on building up resilience
throughout the international system. As this section
has noted, the fact that the political space needed for
comprehensive solutions is not yet open means that the
world is likely to experience more shocks and stresses in
future, on scarcity and on other fronts, with increasing
intensity. At the same time as trying to capitalize on
the windows of opportunity that such crises may offer,
policymakers also need to try to ensure that moments of
system breakdown lead to renewal, rather than to outright
collapse. Resilience is the quality that will determine the
difference between these two outcomes. Accordingly, the
measures suggested earlier in the trade and development
/ fragile states contexts will be critical; many of the
measures proposed in this section are also designed with
an emphasis on resilience in mind.
Another area of work for the immediate term is developing
options for the global ‘operating systems’ needed to
manage scarcity. As already noted, taking advantage
of crisis-driven windows of opportunity fundamentally
depends on readiness, in particular Milton Friedman’s
emphasis on “the ideas that are lying around”.
However, the fact that progress is so slow on so many key
multilateral agendas means that much political energy is
directed at the multilateral equivalent of trench warfare
(think of the complexity of climate negotiations in the runup to Copenhagen) rather than at thinking about what
really comprehensive frameworks for managing global
risk issues, including scarcity, would look like. Accordingly,
when windows of opportunity for thinking the unthinkable
Globalization and Scarcity | Multilateralism for a world with limits
do open, the ideas needed are often nowhere to be seen –
as for example in the immediate aftermath of the financial
crisis.
This paper is intended as a small step in the process of
thinking through what it will take to manage scarcity
issues – but the real thinking needs to be done inside the
multilateral and intergovernmental system, by the people
tasked with agreeing and executing policy.
Finally, governments should commission relevant
international organizations agencies to work together on
producing a World Resources Outlook report.
At present, the Food and Agriculture Organization
produces a World Agricultural Report each year jointly with
the OECD; the International Energy Agency produces an
annual World Energy Outlook; and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change produces what is in effect a World
Climate Outlook. Other important parts of the picture are
covered elsewhere: the UN Environment Programme’s
Global Environmental Outlook report, for instance, comes
out every five years (most recently in 2007) and covers
water availability, forests and other data.
Yet there is no single outlook report that pulls together a
strategic synthesis across all of these issues and explores
the linkages between them thoroughly. This could be
done, however, if member states requested the IEA, FAO,
IPCC, World Bank, IMF, UNEP and OCHA to produce a World
Resources Outlook, that would examine:
•
the state of scientific knowledge about the availability
of key resources, including oil, food, water, and
potentially also land, together with how climate
change will affect each of them;
Such a report would provide policymakers with a valuable,
integrated analysis that they currently lack. Without it, the
risk of unintended consequences from policy may remain
unaddressed. The case of biofuels – where the possible
food security implications of measures taken to promote
energy security were inadequately considered – is a vivid
example of such unintended consequences in practice.
More fundamentally, a World Resources Outlook would
force officials from key international organizations
to spend time together, compare their analyses and
expectations of the future, draw outside experts and
member state officials into the process, and in the process
build shared awareness among potential change agents in
the international system.
Developing more of a culture of jointness across
international organizations would, in turn, help to create
the supporting bandwidth that leaders forums like the G8
and the G20 currently lack. At present, there is a clear trend
to escalate more and more of the hardest global issues
to leaders’ level forums – yet the performance of these
forums to date does not necessarily imply much basis for
confidence, with the G8 in particular sometimes appearing
to be little more than a ‘communiqué machine’.
45
While proposals have been made to improve the
bandwidth of bodies like the G8 or the G20, it appears
unlikely that heads of government would be willing to
cede such a powerful role to a semi-independent body. If,
on the other, existing international organizations proved
themselves capable of taking on more of the burden of
providing analytical support, and perhaps even agenda
management, to bodies like the G8 and G20 then this
could prove to be more palatable alternative.
Medium term tasks
•
•
the economic dimensions of resource availability,
including the risk of price spikes, inflationary trends,
and how resource prices interact with wider trends in
the international economy; and
vulnerability to scarcity trends among poor people
and fragile states.
Over the medium term, the challenge of building greater
interoperability between international agencies will
remain crucial: while energy, food and climate security
are thoroughly integrated, the same cannot be said of
either the international institutions or the government
bureaucracies meant to tackle them.
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At present, international agencies – like their counterpart
ministries in capitals – tend to align along sectoral ‘silo’
lines. As the UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges
and Change noted in 2004,
“The fragmented sectoral approaches of
international institutions mirror the fragmented
sectoral approaches of Governments: for example,
finance ministries tend to work only with the
international financial institutions, development
ministers only with development programs,
ministers of agriculture only with food programs
and environment ministers only with environmental
agencies…” 199
Similar observations could be made of the clusters
of agencies, government ministries and experts that
surround each of the key scarcity issues. This, in turn,
hampers their ability to identify and act on the crucial
inter-linkages between scarcity issues.
46
In the immediate term, one important way of improving
coherence would be to institute regular meetings between
the most directly relevant international agencies, both
at agency heads’ level and at working level, as a means
of improving shared awareness of cross-cutting issues
(and, with luck, of helping governments to take a more
integrated approach themselves in the process). The list of
agencies involved should be kept as short as possible, but
should at a minimum include the UN Secretary-General’s
office, World Bank, International Energy Agency, Food and
Agriculture Organization, UNFCCC Secretariat and the
OECD Secretariat.
The challenge of producing a ‘culture of jointness’ will
also depend on structuring career paths in governments
and international agencies differently. At present, it is
entirely possible for national or international civil servants
to spend their whole career in one agency, or in one city,
or working on one specialized issue area – a fact that is
entirely antithetical to real interoperability and shared
awareness. Instead, secondments ‘elsewhere’ should
be a central, recurrent feature of all staff careers in both
governments and international agencies. Experts on one
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scarcity issue – climate change, say – should be required
to spend time working on other scarcity issues. Officials
from one department need to spend time in other
sectoral departments – or other governments. Staffers
in international agencies should spend time working in
national governments, and vice versa.
Above all, there is no substitute for officials from different
sectors and agencies spending time working together
collaboratively. Talking about joined-up working is not
the same as doing it. Leon Fuerth gives the example of
structured thinking about possible future scenarios as
one kind of useful collaborative working; another might
be for officials from different backgrounds to be immersed
in simulated situations (‘war games’) in which they can
evaluate their own performance after real time exercises.
Finally, policymakers need to start to develop political
narratives centered on the idea of ‘fair shares’,
especially in the areas of food, energy and climate
change, as a way of preparing the ground for managing
scarcity more effectively.
Previous sections have touched on a range of pressing
distributional issues arising from climate change and
scarcity, among them access to oil supplies, transboundary water resources, the allocation of a future
global emissions budget, and even diets in developed and
emerging economies, given that ‘western diets’ that are
richer in meat and dairy products are also more intensive
in energy, grain and water use and in greenhouse gas
emissions.
Admittedly, there are significant dissimilarities between
the examples cited above. Some sit at the global level,
while others are regional; some are about resources that
are renewable (like water), while others concern finite
supplies (such as oil); some (like the sharing out of a global
emissions budget) are readily amenable to government
action, while others (such as individual consumers’
decisions about what to eat) are less so, even if they still
fundamentally involve questions of collective action.
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Yet the similarities outweigh the differences, above all
in that all of these examples are fundamentally about
fairness. Policymakers who recognize the need for
collective action, and actively want to reach international
deals on climate change and scarcity, will help themselves
and each other if they can start to shape consensus on
what a ‘fair’ solution looks like – which involves creating
simple, clear and widely-shared yardsticks to moderate
the debate on scarcity issues.
In the climate change context, for example, policymakers
could usefully focus debate around the variable of
per capita emissions, which leads on to an intuitively
recognizable metric of fairness. At present, countries
cluster in four rough groups in terms of their per capita
emissions:
•
High per capita emitters like the US or Australia (at
19.5 and 18.1 tonnes of CO2 emitted per capita
respectively);
•
Medium high emitters like Japan or Germany (9.6 and
9.5 tonnes respectively);
•
Medium low emitters like China or Mexico (4.3 and 4.1
tonnes respectively, close to the world average of 4.5
tonnes); and
•
Low emitters like Brazil, India or Burkina Faso (1.7, 1.3
and 0.1 tonnes respectively).200
If leaders who genuinely want a deal on climate change
start to talk consistently in terms of equalizing per capita
emission entitlements within a global emissions budget,
then, they can help to build understanding of climate
solutions that combine a long term objective with a
measure of fairness, while also indicating countries’
proportionate contribution to the problem – and how
they fit into the solution. Similar moves are needed on
other scarcity issues too.
Conclusion
Climate change and resource scarcity have the potential
to pose an existential challenge to globalization. While
interdependence, complexity and prosperity have
all increased massively over the past few decades as
globalization has accelerated, the process has been neither
sustainable, nor resilient, nor equitable.
Now, scarcity issues – together with other global risks
such as financial crises, pandemics like swine flu, or
trans-boundary security risks such as terrorism and arms
proliferation – are part of a range of threats to globalization
that epitomize why this greater sustainability, equity and
resilience is needed.
Inevitably, the fact that increasing globalization has come
with ‘shadow sides’ will lead some voices to argue that the
process of globalization should be slowed, halted or even
reversed. The risk of protectionism as a misguided response
to the credit crunch and the ensuing global downturn
remains very real. A global flu pandemic could lead to
borders becoming less porous to international travel and
migration. Scarcity issues could provide an even larger
impetus for pulling away from global interdependence
– whether towards greater, or towards intensifying
competition (or conflict) for dwindling resources.
47
This paper, however, has suggested that there is an
alternative – that rests on more globalization and
interdependence, not less. Crucially, though, it has argued
that effective multilateral institutions and responsible
sovereignty are the key to effecting this shift, and to
nudging international relations towards increased levels
of non-zero sum cooperation on scarcity issues instead of
an intensifying zero sum competition for resources.
It is not yet clear whether the process of creating a
multilateralism capable of coping with scarcity will be a
big bang (perhaps following a systemic crisis) or a slow,
evolutionary process. What is already clear, though, is that
it is a process that policymakers and publics have no real
choice but to embark on together – and soon.
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Endnotes
Wolf (2007).
UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
3. Von Braun (2008); World Bank (2008).
4. Gorst (2010); Blas and Gorst (2010).
5. International Grains Council (2010).
6. Beddington (2009).
7. FAO (http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en). Accessed 20 February 2009.
8. Evans (2009); Von Braun (2007); World Bank (2008); IMF (2008); Dart (2008).
9. Evans (2009).
10. FAO (http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en). Accessed 5 October 2010.
11.World Bank (2007)
12. Ibid.
13. Trostle (2008)
14. World Bank data – see http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC/countries/1W?display=default (accessed 6 October 2010)
15. Easterling et al. (2007); Cline (2007); Parry (2008)
16. Evans (1998); OECD / FAO (2009)
17. World Bank (2007)
18. IMF (2008)
19. Poyry (2006); Sohngen et al. (1997)
20. Buringh and Dudal (1987); FAO (2000) – see http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ag049e/AG049E03.htm (accessed 5 October 2010).
21. Aukland et al. (2002). Afforestation projects already qualify for emissions trading permits under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism.
22. FAO (2000) – see http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ag049e/AG049E03.htm (accessed 5 October 2010)
23. World Bank data – see http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC/countries/1W?display=default (accessed 6 October 2010)
24. Evans (2009).
25. Clarke and King (2004). Per capita water consumption rose from a global average of 350 m3 per person in 1900 to 642 m3 per head in 2000.
26. Ibid.
27.Evans (1998); Conway (1997).
28. Postel and Vickers (2004).
29. Conway (1997).
30. Comprehensive Assessment (2007).
31. Conway (1997).
32. Parry (2008).
33. Kundzewicz et al (2007).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Oxford Centre for Water Research (http://ocwr.ouce.ox.ac.uk/research/wmpg/wpi/#links) Accessed 5 October 2010.
38. Giordano and Wolf (2002).
39. Chapagain and Hoekstra (2004).
40. Brabeck-Letmathe (2009).
41. IEA (2009).
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. IEA (2008a).
45. Butler (2008).
46. US Energy Information Administration; Dart (2008).
47. Cambridge Energy Research Associates (2008).
48. Ibid.
49. US Energy Information Administration (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_wco_k_w.htm). Accessed 20 February 2010.
50. Klare (2008).
51. Rubin (2009).
52. Bloomberg data (http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energyprices.html). Accessed 20 February 2010.
53. IEA (2009).
54.For example Deffeyes (2003); Hirsch (2005).
55. Hoyos (2009a); Owen, Inderwildi and King (2010).
56. Parry (2008).
57. Parry (2010).
58. IPCC (2007b).
59. IEA (2008c).
60. IPCC (2007b).
61. US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Mauna Loa Observatory (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/). Accessed 5 October
2009.
62. Evans and Steven (2009b).
1.
2.
48
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Parry (2010).
Sokolov et al. (2009).
65. Easterling et al. (2007).
66. Parry, Evans et al. (2009).
67. IPCC (2007b).
68. Parry (2008).
69. Allison et al. (2009).
70. Lenton (2009).
71. Ibid.
72. Le Quere et al. (2009).
73. Mabey (2009); Schwartz and Randall (2004).
74. Mabey (2009).
75. Goldman Sachs (2007).
76. Ibid.
77. UN DESA (2006). Population growth was 2.19% a year in 1963 and is at 1.15% today. This decline is projected to continue in the future, falling below 1%
in 2020 and to less than 0.5% by 2050.
78. Ibid.
79. Sachs (2008) argues that population could potentially be stabilized at around 7.8 billion people in 2035.
80. Ibid.
81. UN DESA (2006).
82. Lumpkin and Zeigler (2008); IEA (2008c).
83. Currie (2007).
84. Evans (2009).
85. Blas (2008c).
86. IMF (2008).
87. UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
88. FAO (2009).
89. UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008); FAO (2009).
90. FAO (2010).
91. Smith and Vivekananda (2007).
92. For example Evans (2009); Heltberg and Siegel (2008); Dercon (2004).
93. Crooks and Wallis (2007).
94. UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
95. Smith and Vivekananda (2007).
96. Evans G. (2008).
97. Evans (2009).
98. Parry, Evans et al. (2009).
99. Ruckstuhl (2009).
100. UK Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (2005).
101. Green, M. (2008)
102. Jung-a and Oliver. (2008).
103. Burgis (2009).
104. World Bank (2010)
105. Von Braun (2008).
106. Blas and Gorst (2010).
107. Miguel et al (2004); Burke et al (2009).
108. International Crisis Group (2008); Prunier (1997); International Crisis Group (2009a); UNEP (2007)
109. Dagne (2009).
110. OECD (2008). Of the multilateral total, 20% was spent through UN agencies, 36% through the EU, 24% through the World Bank, and the remainder
through regional development banks, the Global Fund and other multilateral agencies.
111. Center on International Cooperation (2010).
112. OCHA (see http://ochaonline.un.org/humanitarianappeal/webpage.asp?Page=1820)
113. UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
114. Borger (2008a).
115. UK Department for International Development (2006).
116. UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
117. Norton et al. (2001)
118. Parry, Evans et al. (2009).
119. Sen (1981).
120. UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
121. Stern (2008).
122. Evans (2009).
123. UNFPA (2009)
124. Parry, Evans et al. (2009).
125. Smith and Vivekananda (2007).
126. UK Department for International Development (2009).
63.
64.
49
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This issue will be addressed in more detail in a forthcoming CIC paper prepared as part of the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report process.
Lovgren (2008).
129. World Bank (see http://www.climatefundsupdate.org/listing/pilot-program-for-climate-resilience
130. Brandt (2008).
131. US Energy Information Administration (2009).
132. IEA (2009).
133. IEA (2009). Of this additional money, 45% or $4.7 trillion is required in the transport sector; the remainder is accounted for by domestic and commercial
buildings ($2.5 trillion), power plants ($1.7 trillion), industry ($1.1 trillion) and biofuels production ($0.4 trillion).
134. IEA (2009). Of the 11 Gigatonne (Gt) total, 6 Gt is accounted for by China, 2 Gt by India, and 1 Gt by the Middle East.
135. IEA (2010).
136. Hoyos (2009b).
137. Evans and Steven (2009b).
138. Evans (2009).
139. Diouf (2008); UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008); Lumpkin and Ziegler (2008).
140. Parry, Arnell et al (2009).
141. Ibid.
142. Ballesteros et al. (2010).
143. Ibid.
144. Evans and Steven (2009b).
145. Ibid.
146. G8 (2009).
147. Gates Foundation (2009).
148. Lumpkin and Ziegler (2008).
149. IEA (2009).
150. Evans and Steven (2009b).
151. Evans and Steven (2009a).
152. Ibid.
153. Evans and Steven (2009b).
154. Ibid.
155. Ibid.
156. See http://www.un.org/wcm/content/site/climatechange/pages/gsp
157. Sachs (2008).
158. Ibid.
159. World Bank (2008).
160. EurActiv / Reuters (2010).
161. Waxman / Markey Climate Bill (2009).
162. World Bank (2009a).
163. Rubin (2009).
164. OECD (2009b).
165. AEA (2009). Modeling undertaken for the UK government in the run-up to Copenhagen suggested that emissions from international shipping will rise
from 845 Mt of CO2 in 2007 to between 1,903 and 2,681 Mt CO2 in 2050 – an increase from 2.7% of global emissions in 2007 to 3-6% in 2050. Over the
same period, emissions from aviation were projected to rise from 378 Mt CO2 to between 1,442 and over 3,000 Mt CO2 – from 1% of global emissions in
2007 to 2-4.5% in 2050.
166. AEA (2009).
167. Rubin (2009).
168. Milne (2009).
169. See for example Evans et al. (2010).
170. IEA (2008d).
171. Ibid.
172. Tanaka (2009).
173. Liu (2008).
174. Von Braun and Torero (2008).
175. Hoddinott and Cohen (2007). This reflects an often-cited problem of the international Food Aid Convention – namely that while food aid ought in
theory to be counter-cyclical, it is in fact strongly pro-cyclical, and highly correlated with grain prices and the size of US harvests.
176. GATT (1947), Article XI.
177. NAFTA (1994), Article 309.
178. Personal communication
179. CSIS Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (2008).
180. Pan et al. (2008).
181. US National Security Council (2006). See also Klare (2008).
182. Klare (2008).
183. IEA (2008c).
184. US National Intelligence Council (2008).
185. Klare (2008).
186. Borger (2008b).
187. World Bank (2008); IMF (2008); Dart (2008).
127.
128.
50
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UNEP (2002).
Giordano and Wolf (2002).
190. Ibid.
191. Paskal (2009).
192. Boulton (2009).
193. Ibid.
194. TNN (2009).
195. UNCLOS (1982).
196. Black (2001); IOM (2008).
197. Evans and Steven (2009b).
198. Fuerth (2006).
199. HLP High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, Change (2004).
200. World Bank (2009b).
188.
189.
51
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